Behavioral Ecology Vol. 13 No. 5: 682-689
© 2002 International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Nonlocal male mountain white-crowned sparrows have lower paternity and higher parasite loads than males singing local dialect
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1003, USA
Address correspondence to E.A. MacDougall-Shackleton, Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada. E-mail: eams{at}sympatico.ca. E.P. Derryberry is now at the Department of Biology, Duke University, PO Box 90338, Durham, NC 227708, USA. T.P. Hahn is now at the Section of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California Davis, Davis, CA 95616-8761, USA.
Bird song often varies geographically, and when this geographic variation has distinct boundaries, the shared song types are referred to as song dialects. We investigated the role of song dialect in male mating success in a wild breeding population of mountain white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha). In 2 of 3 years, males singing unusual songs ("nonlocal" males) had lower total fertilization success (measured by microsatellite paternity analysis) than did males singing the local dialect ("local" males). Similarly, females produced disproportionately more young with local than with nonlocal males. However, dialect was not a significant predictor of male mating success when controlling for other factors that might affect paternity. Instead, the low mating success of nonlocal males was apparently due to an interaction between song dialect and parasite load. Nonlocal males were more severely infected by bloodborne Haemoproteus than were local males, although they did not differ in any other measured aspect of quality. Immigrant birds may be immunologically disadvantaged, possibly due to a lack of previous experience with the local parasite fauna, resulting in low mating success.
Key words: Haemoproteus, parasite load, parasite resistance, paternity, song dialect, white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha.
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