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Costs and benefits of brain lateralization may depend on environmental conditions. Growing evidence indicates that the development of brain functional asymmetries is adaptively shaped by the environmental conditions experienced during early life. Food availability early in life could act as a proxy of the environmental conditions encountered during adulthood, but its potential modulatory effect on lateralization has received little attention. We increased food supply from egg laying to early nestling rearing in a wild population of lesser kestrels Falco naumanni, a sexually dimorphic raptor, and quantified the lateralization of preening behavior (head turning direction). As more lateralized individuals may perform better in highly competitive contexts, we expected that extra food provisioning, by reducing the level of intra-brood competition for food, would reduce the strength of lateralization. We found that extra food provisioning improved nestling growth, but it did not significantly affect the strength or direction of nestling lateralization. In addition, maternal body condition did not explain variation in nestling lateralization. Independently of extra food provisioning, the direction of lateralization differed between the sexes, with female nestlings turning more often toward their right. Our findings indicate that early food availability does not modulate behavioral lateralization in a motor task, suggesting limited phenotypic plasticity in this trait.

Identifying the causes and fitness consequences of intraspecific variation in cognitive performance is fundamental to understand how cognition evolves. Selection may act on different cognitive traits separately or jointly as part of the general cognitive performance of the individual. To date, few studies have examined simultaneously whether individual cognitive performance covaries across different cognitive tasks, the relative importance of individual and social attributes in determining cognitive variation, and its fitness consequences in the wild. Here, we tested 38 wild southern pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) on a cognitive test battery targeting associative learning, reversal learning and inhibitory control. We found that a single factor explained 59.5% of the variation in individual cognitive performance across tasks, suggestive of a general cognitive factor. General cognitive performance varied by age and sex; declining with age in females but not males. Older females also tended to produce a higher average number of fledglings per year compared to younger females. Analysing over 10 years of breeding data, we found that individuals with lower general cognitive performance produced more fledglings per year. Collectively, our findings support the existence of a trade-off between cognitive performance and reproductive success in a wild bird.

With global temperatures rapidly increasing, biologists require tools to assess how wild animals are responding to heat. Thermal imaging of the eye region offers a potential non-invasive alternative to traditional techniques to study thermoregulation and stress responses in wild animals. However, we currently have a poor understanding of how the temperature of the eye region is regulated under increasing temperature and whether this regulation differs among individuals. Here, we use thermal imaging to repeatedly measure the maximum temperature of the eye region (periorbital temperature) in 42 wild pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) under natural air temperatures ranging from 14.3 to 42.5 °C. Our aim was to determine the relationship between periorbital temperature and air temperature, whether this relationship is repeatable, and whether it differs according to individual attributes. Periorbital temperature showed a non-linear increase with air temperature, becoming independent of air temperature above 38 °C. Above 38 °C, periorbital temperature was not explained by any individual attributes. Below 38 °C, periorbital temperature increased more steeply in individuals with low body mass and it was lower in older compared to younger females. However, the effect of these individual attributes was small compared to the effect of wind speed, air temperature and head tilt. Additionally, the repeatability of individual periorbital temperature was low (R 0.25) and non-significant both below and above 38 °C. Our findings warrant caution in the use of periorbital temperature to infer individual thermoregulatory responses to increasing temperatures, especially in the wild, where control over confounding non-physiological factors is limited.

Nest-dwelling ectoparasites are a major source of stress for growing nestling birds, as they can negatively impact on growth and physiology, with consequences on pre-fledging mortality. Ectoparasites are expected to also affect chromatic traits involved in parent-offspring communication, because their expression requires the same resources used by nestlings for parasites defence and/or it is linked to individual state. However, the effects of ectoparasites on growth, condition and expression of begging components are poorly known, especially in raptors. Here, we examined the effects of an experimental ectoparasites removal on growth (body mass and forearm length) and expression of begging traits (size and colour of flange, cere and gape) in lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni) nestlings. Our manipulation was very effective in removing ectoparasites and parasite load had several detrimental effects on early growth and expression of visual signals directed to parents. Deparasitized nestlings grew faster in terms of body mass and forearm length, as well as mouth width and cere length. In addition, the red chromaticity of cere decreased with age, with deparasitized nestlings showing a faster decrease concomitantly with the increase in body growth. Such negative effects disappeared in later nestling stages and ectoparasites did not affect pre-fledging survival. Our results showed that visual components of begging have the potential to reveal individual condition during early nestling stages, above and beyond ectoparasite infection. They are also consistent with previous evidence that ectoparasites weakly affect fitness in colonial and cavity-nesting avian hosts, which have evolved greater resistance due to prolonged host-parasite interactions. Ectoparasites are considered a major stressor for nestling birds, as they can negatively affect their growth, survival but also traits involved in parent-offspring communication. We experimentally show that ectoparasite infection has only little and transient negative effects on the early growth of lesser kestrel nestlings. However, nestlings recover from such a slower growth without paying any cost in terms of final body size and pre-fledging survival. In addition, we reveal that mouth colour does not mirror the level of ectoparasite infestation, but it is a reliable signal of nestlings’ individual general condition. Therefore, ectoparasites only weakly affect fitness in this species, likely because of the intense host-parasite interaction, which is typical of colonial and cavity-nesting species.

Conflicts are inherent to family systems and may occur at three levels. First, each parent benefits if its mate takes the greater share of parental investment. Second, offspring try to manipulate their parents into devolving more resources than it is optimal for them. Third, siblings compete for resources. Food availability can affect the dynamics of each level of interaction. By means of a food supplementation experiment, we assessed how the initial availability of extra food during breeding affects later parental effort, sibling competition, and parent-offspring interactions in a small dimorphic raptor, the lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni). Being the larger sex, female nestlings are likely to have higher energy requirements. Female-biased broods had a higher rate of aggressive interactions and were fed more frequently in control nests. Food was not shared evenly among broodmates, and daughters tended to receive more feedings than sons. In young broods, parents controlled food allocation by entering the nest, whereas in older broods, offspring controlled food allocation by monopolizing the nest site entrance. Extra food induced male parents to reduce the rate of feedings delivered by entering the nest. Additionally, extra food improved nestling growth in male-biased broods, leading to an increase in the frequency of parental feedings and aggressive interactions, likely due to faster growth rates. These findings reveal a key effect of brood sex ratio in determining family interactions in a species with reverse sexual size dimorphism and suggest that all levels of conflict between family members should be considered simultaneously when investigating the evolution of parental care. Breeding poses energetic costs on parents, and environmental resources are usually limited. To successfully breed, parents coordinate their efforts and manage the allocation of resources to offspring, while offspring communicate their needs. Conflict can arise among family members: each parent benefits if the other takes on most of the workload, offspring ask for more care than what parents can provide, and siblings compete for food. Food availability affects these interaction levels separately, but they have rarely been integrated. By providing extra food to lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni) nests, we show that parental provisioning behaviour and sibling competition are simultaneously affected by initial resource availability during breeding. Although lesser kestrel nestlings show only moderate sex differences in body size (and therefore energy requirements), the effect of extra food on family interactions primarily depended on the sex ratio of the brood.

Nocturnal birds rely on achromatic visual signals to assess rivals and potential mates, but variation in the expression of these displays has been understudied. Here we use UV-visible reflectance spectrometry to study colour variation and the potential signalling function of the dark brown chest and white rump plumage – a colour pattern conspicuously exhibited during twilight courtship displays – in nocturnal Mediterranean Storm Petrels Hydrobates pelagicus melitensis from three islands with different exposures to predation and human disturbance. Human activity may increase perceived predation risk and thus affect activity budgets and the physiological stress response, with possible consequences on the relationship between individual body condition and plumage coloration. We found that chest and especially rump feathers reflected in the ultraviolet (UV) but there was no evidence of sexual dichromatism. However, we found support for a male-specific signalling role of plumage coloration. Indeed, chest yellow–red chroma and rump UV chroma were positively related to body condition in males, but only in the two islands representing the poorer environmental conditions. Therefore, environmental variability can potentially modify the reliability of achromatic displays, with possible consequences on sexual selection patterns in a nocturnal bird., European Fisheries Fund (EFF 2007‐2013) ‐ Fundación Biodiversidad (Spanish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Environment). Grant Number: AQUA&PAIÑO (FEP‐FB 20122054) European Commission ‐ University of Padova. Grant Number: ACCORDO N. 2017/2018