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Safe betting: males help dull females only when they raise high-quality offspring

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Abstract

In evolutionary biology, whether parents should enhance or reduce parental care according to mate ornamentation is a subject of great debate. However, the evolution of female ornaments can shed light on this question. In theory, female ornamentation should be traded off against fecundity and thus cannot be wholly informative to males without a direct indication of fecundity. Hence, direct cues of offspring quality should affect the relationship between male investment and female ornamentation. Under this hypothesis, we manipulated two direct cues of offspring quality (egg size and color) after first egg laying in the blue-footed booby and registered male incubation patterns. In this species, foot color is a dynamic signal of current condition and in females is traded off with egg size. We found that males spent more time incubating when paired with dull females but only in nests with large eggs. Males also spent less time incubating small dull eggs. Results indicate that egg size, a direct cue of reproductive value, affected the relationship between male effort and female ornamentation. Males may be willing to help females that have invested in offspring at the expense of ornamentation, which suggests compensation when females are in low condition. Another possibility is that males relax their effort when paired with highly ornamented and fecund females because they have high parenting abilities. Our findings suggest that the information conveyed by female ornaments may depend on direct cues of fecundity. Results also highlight that parental decisions are complex, modulated by a combination of information sources.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to four anonymous reviewers for valuable and constructive comments. We thank René Beamonte-Barrientos, Natalia Lifshitz, and Alejandro Mendez for help in the field. We thank the fisherman from San Blas and Camichín, the staff from Parque Nacional Isla Isabel, and the Armada de México for logistic support. SEMARNAT gave working permissions and approved the research. This work was supported by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (PAPIIT IN211406, IN228309), Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (47599, 81823) of México, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (CGL2006-10357-C02-01/CGL2009-10883-C02-01 and Juan de la Cierva fellowship to JM) of Spain, and a research grant (2007) from the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour to JM.

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  1. Judith Morales

    Present address: Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), José Gutiérrez Abascal 2, 28006, Madrid, Spain

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ecoloxía e Bioloxía Animal, Facultade de Ciencias, Universidade de Vigo, 36310, Vigo, Spain

    Judith Morales & Alberto Velando

  2. Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva, Laboratorio de Conducta Animal, Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, AP 70-275, México, DF 04510, Mexico

    Roxana Torres

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  1. Judith Morales
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Correspondence to Judith Morales.

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Communicated by S. Pruett-Jones

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Morales, J., Torres, R. & Velando, A. Safe betting: males help dull females only when they raise high-quality offspring. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 66, 135–143 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1261-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1261-8

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