A diagnosis model of parental care:How parents optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction?  

作　　者：Zhen-Qin Zhu Shu-Mei Zi Li-Fang Gao Xiao-Dan Zhang Fang-Yuan Liu Qian Wang Bo Du 

机构地区：[1]School of Life Sciences,Lanzhou University,Lanzhou City,Gansu Province 730000,China [2]College of Ecology,Lanzhou University,Lanzhou City,Gansu Province 730000,China

出　　处：《Current Zoology》2023年第4期385-392,共8页动物学报（英文版）

基　　金：This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(grants 31370417,31572271,31772465,32071491).

摘　　要：Altricial birds often display biased preferences in providing parental care for their dependent offspring,especially during food shortages.During this process,such inflexible rules may result in provisioning errors.To demonstrate how parents optimize their provisioning strategies,we proposed a“diagnosis model”of parental care to posit that parents will undergo a diagnosis procedure to test whether selecting against some particular offspring based on phenotype is an optimal strategy.We tested this model in an asynchronous hatching bird,the Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus,based on 10 years of data about demography and parental provisioning behaviors.Given their higher daily survival rates,core offspring(those hatched on the first day)merits an investment priority compared with their marginal brood mates(those hatched on later days).However,a marginal offspring also merited a priority if it displayed greater weight gain than the expected value at the early post-hatching days.Parents could detect such a marginal offspring via a diagnosis strategy,in which they provisioned the brood at the diagnosis stage by delivering food to every nestling that begged,then biased food toward high-value nestlings at the subsequent decision stage by making a negative response to the begging of low-value nestlings.In this provisioning strategy,the growth performance of a nestling became a more reliable indicator of its investment value than its hatching order or competitive ability.Our findings provide evidence for this“diagnosis model of parental care”wherein parents use a diagnosis method to optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction.

关 键 词：brood reduction parental care provisioning strategy weight gain 

分 类 号：Q958[生物学—动物学]