Meeting Abstract
Reproduction is essential for species survival, and the ever-increasing stressors that birds are exposed to raises concerns for population-level health and reproduction. However, studies of chronic stress and individual parental effort have been limited to short periods of surveillance due to difficulty and the high cost in observer hours. This project addressed a key gap in our understanding of stress and reproduction by determining how elevated stress affects nest visitation of parents throughout incubation and chick rearing in zebra finches Taeniopygia gutatta. We used PIT tags in combination with microchip readers, directional sensors and infra-red cameras to track individual visits when one or both parents had experimentally elevated stress levels. We identified sex differences in visitation length and timing, where males and females ‘traded off’ halfway through incubation. Time of day, and age of chicks also affected visitation trends during chick rearing, and we found clear differences in the behaviour of chronically stressed vs unstressed birds during both incubation and chick rearing. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to identify individual behaviour of parents under chronic stress throughout their primary reproductive investment. These results highlight that chronic stress, even when birds are provided with ad libitum resources, dramatically affects parental behavior and reproductive success, thus raising potential issues with reproduction in disruptive environments, and the captive breeding of birds. Moreover, our study offers insight into potential endocrine factors responsible for variation in parental care tactics, and life-history trade-offs.
