Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jonathon DunnORCiD, Dr Clare Andrews, Professor Daniel Nettle, Professor Melissa BatesonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Animals require strategies for coping with periods when food is scarce. Such strategies include storing fat as a buffer, and defending the rate of energy intake by changing foraging behaviour when food becomes difficult to obtain. Storage and behavioural defence may constitute alternative strategies for solving the same problem. We would thus expect any developmental influences that limit fat storage in adulthood to also induce a compensatory alteration in adult foraging behaviour, specifically when food is hard to obtain. In a cohort of hand-reared European starlings, we found that higher manipulated early-life begging effort caused individuals to maintain consistently lower adult body mass over a period of two years. Using an operant foraging task in which we systematically varied the costs of obtaining food, we show that higher early-life begging effort also caused stronger behavioural defence of the rate of energy intake when food was more costly to obtain. Among individuals with the same developmental history, however, those individuals who defended their rate of energy intake most strongly were also the heaviest. Our results are relevant to understanding why there are marked differences in body weight and foraging behaviour even among individuals inhabiting the same environment.
Author(s): Dunn J, Andrews C, Nettle D, Bateson M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Royal Society Open Science
Year: 2018
Volume: 5
Online publication date: 09/05/2018
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 11/05/2018
ISSN (print): 2054-5703
Publisher: The Royal Society Publishing
URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171918
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171918
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
