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The repeatability of avian egg ejection behaviors across different temporal scales, breeding stages, female ages and experiences

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Abstract

An evolutionarily fundamental, yet rarely examined, aspect of host–parasite arms races is the repeatability of individual host responses to parasitism. We examined the repeatability of egg ejection, and the latency to eject, across a time-scale of days (within one breeding attempt), weeks and months (between breeding attempts within one breeding season), and years (across different breeding seasons). The ejection of non-mimetic model eggs by European blackbirds, Turdus merula, showed overall high repeatability (r ~ 0.70) and, similar to empirical patterns on most other behavioral traits already studied, showed decreasing repeatability with time. In contrast, latency to ejection showed negligible repeatability overall (r ~0.20) and did not change with time. Ejection rates, latencies to ejection and the repeatability of egg ejection did not differ between young and old females. Previous experience with experimentation (number of model eggs the female received before the focal trial) marginally non-significantly covaried with egg ejection (positively) and with latency to egg ejection (negatively). Repeatability estimates for both egg ejection and latency to egg ejection at the within one breeding attempt time-scale did not statistically differ from those reported in a previous study of a different blackbird population (introduced population in New Zealand). To our knowledge, this is the first comparison of behavioral repeatability between a native vs. introduced population of any animal species.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Alena Dvorská, Milan Fictum, Lenka Polačiková, Lucia Turčoková, Zuzana Strachoňová, and Jana Weiszensteinová for their help in the field. Shinichi Nakagawa helped with statistical analyses. The study was supported by Human Frontier Science Program awards RGY69/2007 and RGY83/2012 (to MEH and TG), the student project 2010/027 fund of Palacký University (to PS and TG), the PSC-CUNY fund (to MEH), and MSM6198959212 (to TG).

Ethical standards

All work conforms to the ABS/ASAB guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioral research and teaching, and the experiments comply with the current laws of the Czech Republic, where the study was performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology and Laboratory of Ornithology, Palacký University, 17. listopadu 50, 771-46, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Tomáš Grim & Peter Samaš

  2. Department of Psychology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY, 10065, USA

    Mark E. Hauber

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  1. Tomáš Grim
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  2. Peter Samaš
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Correspondence to Tomáš Grim.

Additional information

Communicated by M. Soler

T. Grim and P. Samaš contributed equally to this work.

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Grim, T., Samaš, P. & Hauber, M.E. The repeatability of avian egg ejection behaviors across different temporal scales, breeding stages, female ages and experiences. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 749–759 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1688-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1688-9

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