Abstract
Avian obligate brood parasites lay their eggs in the nests of other species that may provide care for the foreign offspring. Brood parasitism often imparts substantial fitness losses upon host nestlings when they are raised alongside the typically more competitive, larger, and older parasitic chick(s). Whereas fitness costs due to reduced host offspring survival in parasitized broods have been studied in detail, the physiological changes in host nestlings caused by parasitic nestmate(s) are less well known. We compared prothonotary warbler (Protonotaria citrea) nestlings, a host of the nest-sharing brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater), in experimentally parasitized vs. non-parasitized broods. Our aim was to determine whether cohabitation with brood parasitic young impacted host nestling baseline corticosterone plasma concentrations, immune responses, body condition, and mortality. Corticosterone levels and body condition of host nestlings were similar between nests with or without a cowbird nestmate, whereas host immune responses were lower and nestling mortality was greater in parasitized broods, irrespective of variation in brood size or total brood mass. We detected no trade-offs of baseline corticosterone levels with either immune responses or with body condition. These results suggest that this host species’ nestlings experience some adverse fitness-relevant physiological effects in parasitized broods, but are also resilient in other aspects when coping with brood parasitism.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the FigShare depository https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14141156.v1
Code availability
The code generated during the current study are available in the FigShare depository https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14141156.v1
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Acknowledgements
We thank M Abolins-Abols, TJ Benson, and N Antonson for their comments on the manuscript. We also thank A Louder, M Louder, and E DeLeon for their assistance in the field, and A Bell for the use of her lab and equipment. We thank the Cache River Joint Venture (the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources) for their assistance with setting up and permitting the field research in southern Illinois. Funding for data collection was provided by the Katharine Ordway Fund-University of Florida, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Illinois Department of Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy, Illinois Natural History Survey, American Ornithologist’s Union-Student Research Grants, and the Department of Zoology at the University of Florida. This work was also funded in part by an Illinois Distinguished Fellowship (to HMS) and the Harley Jones Van Cleave Professorship (to MEH), with additional support from the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg at Delmenhorst (to MEH).
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Funding was provided by the Katharine Ordway Fund from the University of Florida, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the Nature Conservancy, the Illinois Natural History Survey, American Ornithologist’s Union-Student Research Grants, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship, the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Germany, and the Harley Van Cleave Professorship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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WMS: conceived and designed the study, WMS and JPH: conducted field work, BM: conducted lab work, HMS, MEH, and WMS: conducted data analyses, HMS: wrote first draft, and all authors: edited and approved the submitted version.
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This research was conducted under a University of Florida Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee permit E444, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service migratory bird scientific collecting permit #MB815400-1, a U.S. Geological Survey Bird Banding permit #06507, and Illinois Nature Preserves Commission and National Wildlife Refuge special-use permits.
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Scharf, H.M., Hauber, M.E., Mommer, B.C. et al. The effect of avian brood parasitism on physiological responses of host nestlings. Oecologia 195, 861–872 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04888-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04888-w