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Extra-pair paternity, offspring mortality and offspring sex ratio in the socially monogamous coal tit (Parus ater)

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Abstract

Females of many socially monogamous bird species commonly engage in extra-pair copulations. Assuming that extra-pair males are more attractive than the females’ social partners and that attractiveness has a heritable component, sex allocation theory predicts facultative overproduction of sons among extra-pair offspring (EPO) as sons benefit more than daughters from inheriting their father’s attractiveness traits. Here, we present a large-scale, three-year study on sex ratio variation in a passerine bird, the coal tit (Parus ater). Molecular sexing in combination with paternity analysis revealed no evidence for a male-bias in EPO sex ratios compared to their within-pair maternal half-siblings. Our main conclusion, therefore, is that facultative sex allocation to EPO is absent in the coal tit, in accordance with findings in several other species. Either there is no net selection for a deviation from random sex ratio variation (e.g. because extra-pair mating may serve goals different from striving for ‘attractiveness genes’) or evolutionary constraints preclude the evolution of precise maternal sex ratio adjustment. It is interesting to note that, however, we found broods without EPO as well as broods without mortality to be relatively female-biased compared to broods with EPO and mortality, respectively. We were unable to identify any environmental or parental variable to co-vary with brood sex ratios. There was no significant repeatability of sex ratios in consecutive broods of individual females that would hint at some idiosyncratic maternal sex ratio adjustment. Further research is needed to resolve the biological significance of the correlation between brood sex ratios and extra-pair paternity and mortality incidence, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sabrina Bleidissel, Anke Kalt, Maria Orland, Andrea Petzold, Tanja Meißner and Christiane Wallnisch for their help in the laboratory, Jörg Brün, Thomas Gerken, Volker Janzon, Anja Quellmalz, Jorg Welcker and Doris Winkel for assistance in the field, Karin and Herbert Körner for housing and hospitality during field work and Georg Rüppell for the provision of working facilities. We thank three anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. The project was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Lu 572/2-4) and VD-B was supported by a Ph.D. scholarship provided by the TU Braunschweig. This research was conducted under licence by the competent German authority (No. 509f–42502–46).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zoological Institute, TU Braunschweig, Spielmannstraβe 7, 38106, Braunschweig, Germany

    Verena Dietrich-Bischoff

  2. Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Ecology, University of Bonn, An der Immenburg 1, 53121, Bonn, Germany

    Tim Schmoll & Thomas Lubjuhn

  3. Institute of Avian Research “Vogelwarte Helgoland”, Working Group Population Ecology, Bauernstraße 14, 38162, Cremlingen, Germany

    Wolfgang Winkel

  4. Institute for Biology, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115, Berlin, Germany

    Sven Krackow

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  1. Verena Dietrich-Bischoff
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Correspondence to Thomas Lubjuhn.

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Communicated by S. Pruett-Jones

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Dietrich-Bischoff, V., Schmoll, T., Winkel, W. et al. Extra-pair paternity, offspring mortality and offspring sex ratio in the socially monogamous coal tit (Parus ater). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 60, 563–571 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-006-0201-5

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