Abstract
Food supplementation experiments have provided considerable information about the importance of resource availability in timing reproduction. Supplemented birds usually advance breeding over non-supplemented controls. Initial observations suggested that degree of advancement in studies conducted at higher latitudes was less than in those at lower latitudes. We hypothesized that birds at high latitudes are less responsive to the “supplementary” cue of food. We tested this hypothesis using a literature-based meta-analysis of 36 papers which, because several papers presented separate data sets from different years, yielded 56 “studies.” We used step-wise regression to determine whether latitude, elevation, the duration of supplementation, and the migratory status of the species predicted the degree to which mean clutch initiation dates of food supplemented birds differed from non-supplemented controls (i.e., effect size = \(\overline {\text{X}} _{{{\text{cnt}}}} - \overline {\text{X}} _{{{\text{suppl}}}}\)). Consistent with our predictions, there was a significant inverse relationship between effect size and latitude: elevation, migratory status, and duration of treatment contributed little to the model. Because the response of animals’ reproductive systems to environmental information is mediated by the neuroendocrine system, we discuss two models: (1) the adaptive specialization hypothesis in which higher latitude species that experience a relatively short breeding season have evolved a reliance on photic cues while exhibiting reduced sensitivity to non-photic cues; and (2) the conditional plasticity hypothesis in which an individual might show a marked response to non-photic information if it lived at low latitudes, but be largely driven by photic cues, endogenous rhythms, or both to the relative exclusion of non-photic information if it lived at higher latitudes.
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Acknowledgements
During the time when some of the ideas that led to this paper were being formulated and during the writing of the manuscript we have been supported in part by NSF grants (S. J. S., IBN-9722823, IBN-0049026, and IOB-0346328; T. P. H., IBN-0988470, IBN-0196093, and IBN-0310995). L. Robinson at UM assisted with our understanding of the statistics of meta-analysis. N. Davies, R. Nager, A. Scheuerlein, and J. Martinez-Padilla kindly provided data from their studies that allowed calculation of effect sizes. Thanks to E. Bridge who provided support in many ways and the Animal Behaviour Group of McMaster University who offered constructive input to the manuscript.
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Communicated by Craig Osenberg.
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Schoech, S.J., Hahn, T.P. RETRACTED ARTICLE: Latitude affects degree of advancement in laying by birds in response to food supplementation: a meta-analysis. Oecologia 157, 369–376 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-008-1091-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-008-1091-1