Sponsor
Financial support for our research came from a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Cooperative Agreement 13420-01-J145) to MTM, a Frank M. Chapman Award from the American Museum of Natural History, and an American Ornithologists’ Union Student Research Award to SBS. Our research was also funded in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under a Greater Research Opportunities (GRO) Graduate Program award to SBS.
Published In
The Condor
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2009
Subjects
Bird populations--United States, Population biology, Avian biology
Abstract
Altricial nestlings encase excrement in fecal sacs that parents remove by either ingesting them or transporting them away from the nest. Ingestion may allow energetically or nutritionally deprived parents to recapture energy or nutrients that might be lost because of nestlings' inefficient digestion (the "parental-nutrition hypothesis"), but ingestion may also permit parents to avoid flights from the nest that interfere with parental care (e.g., brooding young; the "economic-disposal hypothesis"). We used a hypothetico-deductive approach to test the two hypotheses' ability to account for fecal-sac ingestion by the Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus). We confirmed the parental-nutrition hypothesis' predictions that more fecal sacs should be ingested in years of food shortage (males only), late in the season when food supplies decline (both sexes), by parents that had the greatest difficulty raising young (i.e., underweight young), and that adults' body condition should vary directly with their rate of fecal-sac ingestion (females only). We rejected the economic-disposal hypothesis' prediction of a decline in fecal-sac ingestion with increasing brood size. The latter, plus the observation that nearly 40% of males ingest fecal sacs despite their spending virtually no time attending nests, suggests that fecal-sac ingestion is not a mechanism to avoid needless and time-consuming flights from the nest that interfere with parental care. Fecal-sac ingestion by Spotted Towhees is better interpreted as either a resource supplement to parents or as a mechanism to satiate hunger so that parents can maintain rates of feeding to dependent young.
DOI
10.1525/cond.2009.080065
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/12677
Citation Details
McKay, J. E., M. T. Murphy, S. Bartos Smith, and J. K. Richardson. 2009. Fecal sac ingestion by spotted towhees. Condor 111:503-510.
Description
This is the publisher's final PDF. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.