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Sex-specific maternal effect on egg mass, laying order, and sibling competition in the Bengalese finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica)

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Abstract

Maternal effects, such as investment in eggs, have profound effects on offspring fitness. Mothers are expected to skew their investment depending on the laying order and sex when unequal sibling competition occurs within a brood because of sex-specific vulnerability and age hierarchy caused by asynchronous hatching. The Bengalese finch hatches asynchronously and shows a moderate reversed sexual size dimorphism. However, contrary to commonly accepted assumptions of size-dependent vulnerability, the smaller sex (male) is more vulnerable to developmental stress caused by sibling competition. We investigated whether maternal investment would be biased by the position in laying order and the sex of eggs, and also explored the possible differences in growth patterns depending on sex, laying order, and age hierarchy by observing chicks fostered to experimentally manipulated broods where brood composition was controlled and age hierarchy was more enhanced than in natural breeding conditions. We found that overall patterns of maternal investment favored the disadvantageous sectors of sibling competition, i.e., eggs of later laying order and sons over those of early laying order and daughters. We also examined the effect of laying order on adult body size and sex differences in growth patterns. When reared in the subordinate age hierarchy, females could compensate for the deficit of decreased growth rate by taking longer to mature, whereas males could not. We suggest that this sex-specific growth pattern could be the cause of sex differences in vulnerability to early developmental stress.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Biolinguistics team for the help in maintaining the birds and the members of National Science Museum, Tokyo for helping with laboratory work. We are also deeply grateful to two anonymous referees and to Nobuyuki Kutsukake and Yoshimasa Seki for the helpful comments on this manuscript. This work was financially supported by a JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. The experiment was performed under proper legislation by Japanese law.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Masayo Soma & Toshikazu Hasegawa

  2. Department of Zoology, National Science Museum, Tokyo, Japan

    Daichi S. Saito

  3. Biolinguistics Laboratory, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Saitama, Japan

    Masayo Soma & Kazuo Okanoya

  4. PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Saitama, Japan

    Kazuo Okanoya

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  1. Masayo Soma
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  2. Daichi S. Saito
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  3. Toshikazu Hasegawa
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  4. Kazuo Okanoya
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Correspondence to Kazuo Okanoya.

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Communicated by J. Graves

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Soma, M., Saito, D.S., Hasegawa, T. et al. Sex-specific maternal effect on egg mass, laying order, and sibling competition in the Bengalese finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 61, 1695–1705 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-007-0400-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-007-0400-8

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