Meeting Abstract
Extra-pair copulations are common in socially monogamous songbirds and occur most frequently before dawn. As both sexes participate in these extra-pair behaviors, females that awaken early in the morning may be more likely to engage in extra-pair copulations. We hypothesized that males at a high risk of cuckoldry (having an early rising social mate), may alter their parental care reflecting this lack of parental certainty. The Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) is a socially monogamous species, but extra-pair mating is common. The goal of this study was to assess the quality of a male’s parental care in relation to the female social mate’s rising time. Highly ornamented individuals often have been found to be less attentive parents, so ornamentation of males was controlled for in the analysis. We recorded female initiation of daily activity during the incubation period to assign timing phenotype, or chronotype, and quantified male feeding rate during the nestling phase. We found that males did not alter the number of feeding visits based on the female’s timing phenotype or amount of white ornamentation, but females who arose earlier in the morning were found to be paired with less ornamented males. Therefore, our findings suggest that male ornamentation is not serving as an honest signal of parental quality in this population. If females are selecting mates based on ornamentation, it may not be based on relative quality of parental care. The relationship between early awakening females being mated with less ornamented males was unexpected, and future research is warranted to explore the nature of this relationship.
