Search

In cooperative species, parental investment may be shared with auxiliaries. Kin selection and other types of benefits have been proposed to explain the evolution of helping behavior. Auxiliaries are expected to be more helpful when closely related to the breeders. In this context, breeders may adjust parental investment in at least three ways: (a) reducing their effort and being compensated by the auxiliaries’ investment (compensatory effect); (b) maintaining their effort, with an increase in total investment (additive effect); or (c) partial compensation, i.e., a decrease in care by the parents but not by as much as the increase in care from the auxiliaries. We studied the cooperative species Colaptes campestris campestris and tested the following hypotheses: (1) partial compensation effect occurs, (2) parents modulate their investment relative to the auxiliaries’ investment, (3) auxiliaries adjust their investment according to their relationship to the offspring, and (4) groups whose members are in better physical condition fledge more young or these are in better condition. We determined relatedness within groups and monitored parental and alloparental behavior during breeding. Breeders in cooperative groups presented the same investment as unattended breeders. Restricting the analysis to cooperative groups revealed that the investment made by auxiliaries reflected their relatedness to the young and positively affected the investment by breeders. Results suggest that a partial compensation occurs in the species, with breeders reducing their effort despite the small increase in overall nest investment. Results highlight the importance of kin selection in the evolution of cooperative breeding in campo flickers. Cooperatively breeding birds may have auxiliaries that help rear their brood. The evolution of helping behavior may derive from kin selection, where auxiliaries could gain a genetic benefit by helping to rear kin, which occurs when groups are composed of closely related individuals. However, it is often the case that some offspring may not be closely related to the auxiliaries due to the species’ mating system. We used the cooperatively breeding campo flickers to investigate whether and how the presence of auxiliaries might affect parental care patterns and nest productivity. We found that breeders did not reduce their investment in the presence of auxiliaries and that cooperative groups present the same overall investment when compared with unassisted pairs, indicating that the investment made by auxiliaries was not large enough to affect the total investment nor the breeders’ investment. Our results also show that auxiliaries increased their investment when they were more closely related to the brood.

One of the most pervasive themes in ecology is that biological diversity stabilizes ecosystem processes and the services they provide to society, a concept that has become a common argument for biodiversity conservation. Species-rich communities are thought to produce more temporally stable ecosystem services because of the complementary or independent dynamics among species that perform similar ecosystem functions. Such variance dampening within communities is referred to as a portfolio effect and is analogous to the effects of asset diversity on the stability of financial portfolios. In ecology, these arguments have focused on the effects of species diversity on ecosystem stability but have not considered the importance of biologically relevant diversity within individual species. Current rates of population extirpation are probably at least three orders of magnitude higher than species extinction rates, so there is a pressing need to clarify how population and life history diversity affect the performance of individual species in providing important ecosystem services. Here we use five decades of data from Oncorhynchus nerka (sockeye salmon) in Bristol Bay, Alaska, to provide the first quantification of portfolio effects that derive from population and life history diversity in an important and heavily exploited species. Variability in annual Bristol Bay salmon returns is 2.2 times lower than it would be if the system consisted of a single homogenous population rather than the several hundred discrete populations it currently consists of. Furthermore, if it were a single homogeneous population, such increased variability would lead to ten times more frequent fisheries closures. Portfolio effects are also evident in watershed food webs, where they stabilize and extend predator access to salmon resources. Our results demonstrate the critical importance of maintaining population diversity for stabilizing ecosystem services and securing the economies and livelihoods that depend on them. The reliability of ecosystem services will erode faster than indicated by species loss alone.

The repayment hypothesis posits that primary sex ratios in cooperative species should be biased towards the helping sex because these offspring “repay” a portion of their cost through helping behavior and therefore are less expensive to produce. However, many cooperatively breeding birds and mammals do not show the predicted bias in the primary sex ratio. Recent theoretical work has suggested that the repayment hypothesis should only hold when females gain a large fitness advantage from the presence of auxiliary adults in the group. When auxiliaries provide little or no fitness advantage, competition between relatives should lead to sex ratios biased towards the dispersing (non-helping) sex. We examined the benefits auxiliaries provide to females and corresponding offspring sex ratios in the red-backed fairy-wren (Malurus melanocephalus), a cooperatively breeding Australian bird with male auxiliary helpers. We found that auxiliaries provide little or no benefit to female reproductive success or survival. As predicted, the population primary sex ratio was biased towards daughters, the dispersing sex, and females with auxiliaries produced female-biased broods whereas females without auxiliaries produced unbiased broods. Moreover, offspring sex ratios were more strongly biased toward females in years when auxiliaries were more common in the population. These results suggest that offspring sex ratios are associated with competition among the non-dispersing sex in this species, and also that females may use cues to assess local breeding opportunities for their offspring.

Maternally derived androgen hormones concentrate in avian egg yolks as the yolks grow on the female’s ovary, possibly forming a basis for important maternal effects in birds. In the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), experimental elevation of yolk androgens in the first-laid egg of a clutch (a-egg) to the concentrations found naturally in a clutch’s later-laid eggs reduces the growth rate of a-egg nestlings compared to controls. These findings, together with discoveries from other species that the effects of yolk androgens on growth of female nestlings may differ from their effects on growth of male nestlings, raise the hypothesis that natural changes in yolk-androgen concentrations with laying order are ultimately due to a difference between the sexes in their yolk-androgen sensitivity and between early- and late-laid eggs in their sex ratio. By re-analyzing previously published data and adding to the analysis data from previously unanalyzed blood samples used for sex determination, we investigated possible sex-specific effects of yolk-androgens in the context of a potential sex-biased laying order in free-living American kestrels. We used a multi-level, mixed model with a Gompertz function to analyze growth of nestlings hatching from a-eggs that were control-treated or in which we experimentally elevated yolk-androgen concentrations shortly after laying to the higher concentrations naturally found in later-laid eggs. We discovered that male nestlings were more susceptible than female nestlings to growth inhibition by yolk-androgen elevation but did not find a bias in sex ratio with respect to laying order. Together, these findings do not support the above hypothesis. However, they are consistent with the hypothesis that sex differences in yolk-androgen sensitivity enable mothers to economically tune reproductive effort to an individual offspring’s reproductive value, which can vary more for one sex than the other.

Most marine fishes have pelagic larvae that settle to benthic juvenile/adult habitats. Ecologists have argued that mortality rates are particularly high during the settlement transition, but relevant data have been sparse. Recently, researchers have used several novel techniques to estimate the magnitude of predation mortality during the settlement transition. We used meta-analysis to determine that for 24 taxonomically diverse species in geographically widespread locations, an estimated 55.7% (CI: 43.0–65.5%) of juveniles were consumed within 1–2 days of settlement. Such high mortality highlights this brief period as a key phase in the life history of fishes and supports the view that these communities are strongly influenced by predation. Additionally, we argue that because predators have such strong effects on juvenile survival, the population and community dynamics of reef fishes may be linked to human exploitation of reef predators.

We present data on\(\bar pn\) and π− n collisions obtained from an exposure of the 30′' FNAL deuterium filled bubble chamber to a mixed\({{\bar p} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{\bar p} {\pi ^ - }}} \right. \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {\pi ^ - }}\) beam with a momentum of 100 GeV/c. We find that in 17±2% of the collisions with the antiproton there is an interaction on the spectator while for the collisions with π− mesons the corresponding number is 15±2%. The\(\bar pn\) and π− n multiplicity distributions have average charged multiplicities of 6.46±0.07 and 6.53±0.08 respectively. The average multiplicities for both types of interactions are slightly smaller than those for the corresponding reactions on hydrogen by an amount that is the same as observed at other energies. As an estimate of\(\bar pn\) annihilation we have calculated the difference\(\sigma _n (\bar pn) - \sigma _n (pn)\) for each prong numbern. We find an average multiplicity of 9±1, a value close to that for\(\bar pp\) annihilation at the same energy. combining our data with lower energy\(\bar pn\) annihilation data, we observe that the average negative multiplicity is systematically larger than that for\(\bar pp\) annihilation similar to the difference between neutron and proton target data with other beam projectiles.

Ambient light intensities in the ocean at depths between 1500 m and 4700 m near Hawaii Island were measured around the one photoelectron level with 5″ diameter hemispherical photomultipliers. Measurements of count rates above variable thresholds were carried out in ship-suspended and bottom-tethered configurations. The ship-suspended rates show considerable fluctuation and their mean value decreases with depth approximately as exp [−x(m)/877]. The bottomtethered rates are about an order of magnitude lower than the ship-suspended rates and show little fluctuation. The calibration of our instrument indicates an absolute flux at 4700 m depth based on the bottom-tethered measurement of 218 −60 +20 photons/cm2·s, which is consistent with calculated intensities due to β-decay electrons from40K. The difference in the two cases is attributed to bioluminescence due to environmental stimulation.