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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on June 4, 2007
Behavioral Ecology 2007 18(4):730-735; doi:10.1093/beheco/arm038
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Extreme gender-based post-fledging brood division in the toc-toc

Luciana B. Vegaa,b, Graham J. Hollowaya, James E. Millettb and David S. Richardsonc

a Centre for Wildlife Assessment & Conservation, The University of Reading, Whiteknights PO Box 228, Reading RG6 6AJ, UK b Nature Seychelles, The Centre for Environment & Education, PO Box 1310, Roche Caiman, Mahe, Republic of Seychelles c Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

Address correspondence to D.S. Richardson. E-mail: david.richardson{at}uea.ac.uk.


  Abstract

The possibility that parents of one sex may preferentially invest in offspring of a certain sex raises profound evolutionary questions about the relative worth of sons and daughters to their mothers and fathers. Post-fledging brood division—in which each parent feeds a different subset of offspring—has been well documented in birds. However, a lack of empirical evidence that this may be based on offspring sex, combined with the theoretical difficulty of explaining such an interaction, has led researchers to consider a gender bias in post-fledging brood division highly unlikely. Here we show that in the toc-toc, Foudia sechellarum, post-fledging brood division is extreme and determined by sex; where brood composition allows, male parents exclusively provision male fledglings, whereas female parents provision female fledglings. This is the first study to provide unambiguous evidence, based on molecular sexing, that sex-biased post-fledging brood division can occur in birds. Male and female parents provisioned at the same rate and neither offspring nor parent survival appeared to be affected by the sex of the parent or offspring, respectively. The current hypotheses predicting advantages for brood division and preferential care for one specific type of offspring are discussed in the light of our results.

Key words: brood division, gender, offspring sex, parental care, provisioning behavior.

Received 15 August 2006; revised 16 February 2007; accepted 1 April 2007.


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