Meeting Abstract
Environmental factors, such as sibling competition, parental care, food availability and weather conditions, can influence the development of altricial young. These factors may “program” an individual’s organizational pathways to best match the conditions it experiences, thus shaping behavioral and physiological phenotypes that persist over the long-term. Altricial nestlings signal their parents by begging, although it remains unclear whether begging is an honest signal of nutritional need or if it is driven by parental behavior and/or competition with siblings. In this study we monitored a free-living species, the Florida scrub-jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens), as nestlings and across the first few years of life to investigate whether nestling begging behavior predicts an individual’s future physiological and behavioral phenotype. We monitored nestling growth, begging rate and bout duration across the nestling period, as well as an individual’s physiological stress response at 11 days of age. We subsequently assessed all individuals’ physiological stress responsiveness (i.e., corticosterone response to capture and handling) at nutritional independence (~70 days of age), one year of age, and annually thereafter. At each stage we also tested all individuals’ neophobic response to a novel object in their home territory. Although nestling corticosterone levels (baseline and stress-induced) do not correlate with begging or with the adult stress response, a strong positive correlation exists between an individual’s begging rate at 11 days of age and its physiological stress response at both nutritional independence and one year of age. This result exists for multiple cohorts, suggesting an individual’s experience as a nestling plays an integral role in shaping its future phenotype.
