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Prey size increases with nestling age: are provisioning parents programmed or responding to cues from offspring?

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Abstract

As offspring grow, parents often feed them with different sizes or taxa of prey to suit the changing nutritional or energetic demands. We investigated whether such changes in prey types were innate and inflexible or whether they were based on the proximate cue of offspring size. We created experimental broods in which parent blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus and pied flycatchers Ficedula hypoleuca received either older nestlings simulating rapid development or younger nestlings simulating delayed development. The size of prey increased over time in all brood types, suggesting a strong programmed pattern of foraging by parents. However, delayed broods were provisioned with smaller prey than control or advanced broods indicating some plasticity in the response by the parents to the size of nestlings. Although female birds brought smaller prey than male birds, both sexes showed the same rate of increase of prey size with time and brought similar types of prey items. The proportion of soft, digestible larva prey in the nestling diet decreased over time in pied flycatchers but increased in blue tits. Counter to the hypothesis that spiders provide unique and preferred nutrients for young nestlings, the proportion of arachnids in the diet did not change with nestling age for either species. The lack of treatment effect on the taxa of prey delivered suggests that temporal shifts in diet composition are not driven by the proximate cues of nestling age or size but that the feeding patterns are fairly innate and fixed in these altricial birds.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support was provided to KLW by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Ethical Standards

The experiments comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed and conducted with permission from the Directorate for Nature Management in Norway (2006/1890, 2007/3295) and from the Animal Welfare Committee of Norway (reference numbers 2006/14549, 2007/8921).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, 112 Science Place, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5E2, Canada

    Karen L. Wiebe

  2. Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1066, Blindern, N-0316, Oslo, Norway

    Tore Slagsvold

Authors
  1. Karen L. Wiebe
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  2. Tore Slagsvold
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Correspondence to Karen L. Wiebe.

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Communicated by M. Leonard

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Wiebe, K.L., Slagsvold, T. Prey size increases with nestling age: are provisioning parents programmed or responding to cues from offspring?. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 711–719 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1684-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1684-0

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