Do mothers bias offspring sex ratios in carotenoid-rich environments?

2nd hihi paper for 2016 out @ Behavioral Ecology!

Kirsty J. MacLeod, Patricia Brekke, Wenfei Tong, John G. Ewen, Rose Thorogood

Behavioral Ecology (2016) 28 (1): 131-137.

Here we've proved that non-significant results can be published!  As part of a wider supplementation experiment investigating the effects of carotenoids (a dietary biochemical responsible for birds' pigmentation and implicated in their immune systems) on hihi, we determined the sex of as many eggs laid as possible.  By following these nests closely in the field, (including hunting tirelessly for dead nestlings thrown from the nest by tidy parents!) we managed to collect a dataset to test whether mothers invest more in sons when these are likely to become sexier adults relative to daughters.  There is some evidence that hihi males with greater access to carotenoids when young achieve greater reproductive success in adulthood (see nice work by Leila Walker during her PhD here and here).  Therefore, we surmised that mothers better able to provision sons with carotenoids might invest in producing more of them to improve their fitness.  Data from two field seasons however failed to find any evidence for this, and provides more evidence that sex-ratio manipulation by mothers is difficult to detect.

Read more about this paper, and Kirsty's companion paper on how mothers manipulate hatching asynchrony, in this nice blog post on her site.

Kirsty's first hihi paper accepted in Animal Behaviour!

Great work Kirsty - her first hihi paper has just been accepted for publication in Animal Behaviour.  

Kirsty took advantage of data collected in the field over ten years ago, and combined this with our long-term breeding records for the Tiritiri Matangi population. Some hihi can live for around 10 years so this was perfectly timed!

Science Cafe kicks off 2016 Cambridge Science Festival

Kirsty and Rose are running the Science Cafe event again as part of this year's Science Festival.  Despite pretty awful weather conditions on Saturday March 5th (gales, rain, and hail!) we reached over 70 people during the 3-hr event in the Cambridge Market Square.  Our goal is to communicate how exciting science is to an audience who perhaps wouldn't normally come to the Science Festival - fingers crossed for better weather next weekend!