Search

Parental care in long-lived bird species involves a trade-off between the benefits of increasing the effort expended on current offspring and the costs that this represents for future reproductive output. Under regimes of high environmental variability, long-lived seabirds can adjust their breeding effort to buffer the negative effects of this variability on their offspring. However, the potential impacts of variation in breeding effort on offspring physiology in the short term and on longer-term survival are poorly understood. In this study, we manipulated brood age through a cross-fostering experiment to assess whether increasing or decreasing parental reproductive expenditure led to costs in Blue-footed Booby Sula nebouxii chicks. Specifically, we tested the consequences of altered parental reproductive expenditure on the offspring's physiological condition (plasma metabolites, heterophil to lymphocyte ratio (H/L) and body condition index ( BCI)) and survival. Offspring from broods in which parental investment was experimentally increased showed a lower BCI and lower alkaline phosphatase levels and higher H/L ratios than controls. Conversely, offspring showed the opposite pattern when reproductive expenditure was experimentally decreased. We observed no effects of manipulation of parental investment on triglyceride levels or on survival rates. Although our findings suggest that Blue-footed Booby parents have the ability to adjust their breeding effort according to the demands of their offspring, parental effort could influence the effect of hatching order by suppressing the aggressive tendency of the senior chick. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assessed population differentiation and gene flow across the range of the blue-footed booby ( Sula nebouxii) (1) to test the generality of the hypothesis that tropical seabirds exhibit higher levels of population genetic differentiation than their northern temperate counterparts, and (2) to determine if specialization to cold-water upwelling systems increases dispersal, and thus gene flow, in blue-footed boobies compared with other tropical sulids. Work was carried out on islands in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean from Mexico to northern Peru. We collected samples from 173 juvenile blue-footed boobies from nine colonies spanning their breeding distribution and used molecular markers (540 base pairs of the mitochondrial control region and seven microsatellite loci) to estimate population genetic differentiation and gene flow. Our analyses included classic population genetic estimation of pairwise population differentiation, population growth, isolation by distance, associations between haplotypes and geographic locations, and analysis of molecular variance, as well as Bayesian analyses of gene flow and population differentiation. We compared our results with those for other tropical seabirds that are not specialized to cold-water upwellings, including brown ( Sula leucogaster), red-footed ( S. sula) and masked ( S. dactylatra) boobies. Blue-footed boobies exhibited weak global population differentiation at both mitochondrial and nuclear loci compared with all other tropical sulids. We found evidence of high levels of gene flow between colonies within Mexico and between colonies within the southern portion of the range, but reduced gene flow between these regions. We also found evidence for population growth, isolation by distance and weak phylogeographic structure. Tropical seabirds can exhibit weak genetic differentiation across large geographic distances, and blue-footed boobies exhibit the weakest population differentiation of any tropical sulid studied thus far. The weak population genetic structure that we detected in blue-footed boobies may be caused by increased dispersal, and subsequently increased gene flow, compared with other sulids. Increased dispersal by blue-footed boobies may be the result of the selective pressures associated with cold-water upwelling systems, to which blue-footed boobies appear specialized. Consideration of foraging environment may be particularly important in future studies of marine biogeography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In marine ecosystems climatic fluctuation and other physical variables greatly influence population dynamics, but differential effects of physical variables on the demographic parameters of the two sexes and different age classes are largely unexplored. We analyzed the effects of climate on the survival and recruitment of both sexes and several age classes of a long-lived tropical seabird, the Blue-footed Booby (Sula nebouxii), using long-term observations on marked individuals. Results demonstrated a complex interaction between yearly fluctuations in climate (both local and global indexes, during both winter and breeding season) and the sex and age of individuals. Youngest birds' survival and. recruitment were commonly affected by local climate, whereas oldest birds' parameters tended to be constant and less influenced by environmental variables. These results confirm the theoretical prediction that sex- and age-related variation in life-history demographic traits is greater under poor environmental conditions, and they highlight the importance of including variability in fitness components in demographic and evolutionary models. Males and females showed similar variation in survival but different recruitment patterns, in relation to both age and the spatial scale of climatic influence (local or global). Results indicate different life-history tactics for each sex and different ages, with birds likely trying to maximize their fitness by responding to the environmental contingencies of each year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contradictory patterns of density-dependent animal dispersal can potentially be reconciled by integrating the conspecific attraction hypothesis with the traditional competition hypothesis. We propose a hypothesis that predicts a U-shaped relationship between density and both natal and breeding dispersal distance. Using 10 years of observations on a breeding colony of the Blue-footed Booby (Sula nebouxii), the hypothesis was confirmed by documenting simultaneous positive and negative density-dependent dispersal distances in natal and breeding dispersal of males and breeding dispersal of females within the colony. Point-pattern analyses demonstrated that the breeding sites of Blue-looted Boobies were highly aggregated in all years within a large study area. and aggregation presumably resulted in heterogeneity in patch density throughout the colony. As predicted, at moderate to high densities, dispersal distances showed positive density dependence, with individuals moving to lower density patches. In contrast, at low to moderate densities, dispersal distances showed negative density dependence, with individuals moving to higher density patches. In both sexes of the 1994 cohort, the higher the mean density in patches used by an individual over the long term (up to age I 1 years), the fewer fledglings it produced. A positive effect of density on long- term reproductive success was not detected, possibly because birds that failed during pair formation or incubation were not sampled. Density of conspecifics may be an important influence on habitat selection of breeders, and dispersal may tend to carry individuals to patches where pair formation opportunities are better and negative effects of competition on reproductive success are reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary 1. In long-lived species, such as seabirds, the allocation of resources between self-maintenance and reproduction is of particular interest because only a small reduction in adult survival may have a large negative effect on lifetime reproductive success. There is much debate about whether seabirds have a fixed or flexible level of investment in their current reproduction, and it has been proposed that parents can regulate the risk of an increase in mortality under the control of a mass threshold. 2. Body mass change as response to experimental manipulations of parental effort was examined in blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii Mine-Edwards), a sexually size-dimorphic seabird, with females approximately 31% heavier than males. 3. First, paternal effort was manipulated by trimming the flight feathers and thereby handicapping males during the chick-rearing period. Mass remained stable in handicapped males, while there was a reduction of female body mass as response to the handicapped partner. The handicapping of males had a significant effect on chick mass. 4. Secondly, an experiment was made by enlarging and decreasing broods of two chicks to three and one during the first week after hatching. Body mass of females, but not males, was lower in enlarged broods, and body mass of males, but not females, was higher in the reduced broods when the chicks were 45 days old. Chick body masses were lower among enlarged broods than among reduced and control broods. 5. Overall, these and other results revealed that blue-footed boobies have a sex-specific body mass regulation. Males had a fixed body mass at the end of experiments; they were working at some physiological maximum or were unwilling to pay the cost in terms of future survival, when the effort demanded was increased. Females performed a flexible effort and were working with a buffer of nutritional reserves that they used when necessary. Below a critical level, females preferentially allocated resources to the maintenance of their body condition at the expense of investment in current reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]