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178 results for “great tit”

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dryad40/100

Early developmental carry-over effects on exploratory behaviour and DNA methylation in wild great tits (Parus major)

Adverse, postnatal conditions experienced during development are known to induce lingering effects on morphology, behaviour, reproduction and survival. Despite the importance of early developmental stress for shaping the adult phenotype, it is largely unknown which molecular mechanisms allow for the induction and maintenance of such phenotypic effects once the early environmental conditions are released. Here we aimed to investigate whether lasting early developmental phenotypic changes are associated with post-developmental DNA methylation changes. We used a cross-foster and brood size experiment in great tit (Parus major) nestlings, which induced post-fledging effects on biometric measures and exploratory behaviour, a validated personality trait. We investigated whether these post-fledging effects are associated with DNA methylation levels of CpG sites in erythrocyte DNA. Individuals raised in enlarged broods caught up on their developmental delay after reaching independence and became more explorative as days since fledging passed, while the exploratory scores of individuals that were raised in reduced broods remained stable. Although we previously found that brood enlargement hardly affected pre-fledging methylation levels, we found 420 CpG sites that were differentially methylated between fledged individuals that were raised in small versus large sized broods. A considerable number of the affected CpG sites were located in or near genes involved in metabolism, growth, behaviour and cognition. Since the biological functions of these genes line up with the observed post-fledging phenotypic effects of brood size, our results suggest that DNA methylation provides organisms the opportunity to modulate their condition once the environmental conditions allow it. In conclusion, this study shows that nutritional stress during early development associates with indirect, carry-over effects on DNA methylation. We propose that treatment-associated DNA methylation differences arise as a consequence of pre-fledging phenotypic changes, rather than that they cause early environmentally-induced effects.

opencc-zeroFeb 2024View details →

dryad40/100

Great tits (Parus major) flexibly learn that herbivore-induced plant volatiles indicate prey location – an experimental evidence with two tree species

1. When searching for food, great tits (Parus major) can use herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) as an indicator of arthropod presence. Their ability to detect HIPVs was shown to be learned, and not innate, yet the flexibility and generalization of learning remains unclear. 2. We studied if, and if so how, naïve and trained great tits (Parus major) discriminate between herbivore-induced and non-induced saplings of Scotch elm (Ulmus glabra) and cattley guava (Psidium cattleyanum). We chemically analysed the used plants and showed that their HIPVs differed significantly and overlapped only in a few compounds. 3. Birds trained to discriminate between herbivore-induced and non-induced saplings preferred the herbivore-induced saplings of the plant species they were trained to. Naïve birds did not show any preferences. Our results indicate that the attraction of great tits to herbivore-induced plants is not innate, rather it is a skill that can be acquired through learning, one tree species at a time. 4. We demonstrate that the ability to learn to associate HIPVs with food reward is flexible, expressed to both tested plant species, even if the plant species has not coevolved with the bird species (i.e. guava). Our results imply that the birds are not capable of generalising HIPVs among tree species but suggest that they either learn to detect individual compounds or associate whole bouquets with food rewards.

opencc-zeroJun 2022View details →

dryad40/100

Altitudinal differences in foraging decisions under predation risk in great tits

Foraging decisions under risk of predation are crucial for survival as predation risk can contribute to a reduction of food intake over time leading to a trade-off between starvation and predation. Environmental variation can provoke changes in food accessibility or predation risk that will in turn affect foraging decisions. Specifically, less predictable or harsher environments, such as those found at high elevation, should lead to more risk-prone foraging in order to prevent risk of starvation, but empirical confirmation of this hypothesis is lacking. In the current study, we used video playbacks combined with an automatic feeder to measure continuous foraging choices between control and predator videos by wild great tits originating from high and low elevations and tested under controlled conditions. Great tits discriminated between two conditions representing differences in predation risk and visited the feeder less frequently when a predator was shown. Moreover, we found that birds from low elevation populations were more risk-averse and visited the feeder significantly less when a predator video playback was broadcasted compared to high elevation individuals. This elevation related contrast was also dependent on the season, body mass and fat reserves of individuals, and was more marked in females. Furthermore, adults visited the feeder less in the presence of a predator compared to yearlings. These results are consistent with predictions from life history theory and starvation-predation trade-off hypotheses and could have implications for individual movements and population dynamics in changing environments.

opencc-zeroApr 2024View details →

zenodo40/100

DataSet & R code used for the analysis of "Mechanisms of mobbing call recognition: Exploring featural decoding in great tits"

Data and R code used in a playback experiment exploring the mechanisms of mobbing call recognition in the great tit, Parus major. Accepted in Animal Behaviour (2024).  This experiment aimed at testing the hypothesis of simple featural interpretation in the great tit (i.e., the fact that receivers can focus on specific acoustic features rather than complete note recognition).  The experiment is organised with two parts: first, we test the response of great tits to artificial calls that possess either none or all of the characteristics present in their own calls (and shared with other Parids), and compare their level of response to natural mobbing calls.  As the 'complete' treatment triggered the same level fo response than the natural calls, we then create artifical calls with only one of the four features used to create our artifical mobbing calls (large frequency range, low frequency, noise and harmonics).    More information can be obtained by contacting Ambre SALIS (salis.ambre87[at]gmail.com)

opencc-by-4.0May 2024View details →

zenodo40/100

Data to test for the early learning of the foraging niche hypothesis in Great Tits

This is the data set for the paper “Did you learn what to eat from your parents? A test of the early learning of the foraging niche hypothesis in Great Tits Parus major”, published in Journal of Avian Biology.  We collected information on foraging preferences of breeding Great Tits during twelve years (2011-2022) in the field station of Can Catà, within Collserola Natural Park (Cerdanyola, Barcelona, NE Iberian Peninsula, 45º 27' N, 2º 8' E). To obtain data about nestlings’ diet, we attached infra-red Micro-D cameras (Mini Colour Sony IR Camera SK-C170IR) to the nest top inside the nest-box and focused on the entrance, thus allowing us to identify delivered prey. Nests were recorded from 07:00-13:00h (five hours). Prey were classified into three categories -caterpillars, spiders and others- because caterpillars and spiders are the most important prey types for Mediterranean populations of Great Tits. The size of each prey item was determined according to a semi-quantitative scale in relation to beak size of the Great Tit, which has an average size of 9 mm. Size categories were: 1=small (smaller than beak size), 2 = medium (similar to beak size), 3 = large (larger than beak size). Data refers to percentage of caterpillars, percentage of spiders, percentage of ‘other prey’ and mean prey size (of all prey categories). To perform the analyses the percentage of each type of prey (caterpillars, spiders and ‘other prey’) were square-root transformed to approximate normality. Since the diet of individuals may vary across years due to changing weather conditions and environmental factors affecting prey availability, before comparing an individual’s diet across different years, data was standardised for different variables using a generalised linear mixed-effects model fitted by restricted maximum likelihood. Variables included were ‘year’, ‘sex’, ‘age’ (to distinguish if the breeding individual was yearling or adult), ‘brood size’, ‘brood age’, ‘date of recording’ (taken as the number of days from 1st April to control for phenology), and the proportion of oak trees in relation to Aleppo Pines within 25m of the nest-box. Analysis allowed to extracte residuals for further analysis, which appear in the four provided tables.   For each individual we provide prey data corresponding to the chick stage and the data from the adult stage. Data is divided in four different sheets, using different variants of the diet data that individuals received as a chick: (1) using exclusively the father’s data (referred to as Father Data), (2) using only the mother’s data (referred to as Mother Data), (3) using the mean of both parents’ prey data (referred to as Mean Data), and (4) using weighted parents data depending on the number of provisioning trips (giving more importance to the prey delivered by the most actively feeding parent, referred to as Weighted Data).

opencc-by-4.0Jun 2024View details →

zenodo40/100

Viral catalogue from faecal microbiomes of great tits and blue tits

<h2>Overview:</h2> The vertebrate gut microbiome plays crucial roles in host health and disease. However, there is limited data on the microbiomes of wild birds, most of which is restricted to barcode sequences. We therefore explored the use of shotgun metagenomics on the faecal microbiomes of two wild bird species widely used as model organisms in ecological studies: the great tit (Parus major) and the Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). High and Medium quality Metagenome Assembled Genomes (MAGs) were assembled from these metagenomes and are made available as a catalogue in this archive. <h2>Methods:</h2> Metagenomic reads were trimmed, and quality controlled using FastP configured to a minimum phred score of 20 and minimum length of 50 bp. The potential viral and plasmidic sequences were retrieved from the assembled contigs using GeNomad v1.8.0 (Camargo et al. 2023) and the quality of these viral sequences was then assessed using CheckV v 1.0.3 (Nayfach et al. 2021) using the checkV database v 1.5. Putative viral sequences longer than 1000bp carrying at least one hallmark viral gene or no detectable cellular genes were considered in this analysis. The viral sequences were clustered into species-level vOTU clusters using mmseqs2 v2.13 using an identity threshold of 95% over 75% of the longest sequence. For viral species identified as Caudoviral, the potential host was inferred using iPhop v1.3.3 (Roux et al 2023). <h2>Files:</h2> <ul> <li>The vOTU_characteristics.csv table contains the sequence characteristics from CheckV and the viral taxonomy determined by GeNomad</li> <li>The vOTU_PredictedHost.csv table contains the viral sequence inferred host from iPhop</li> <li>The vOTU_representatives.fasta file contains the fasta sequence of the vOTU representatives</li> </ul>

opencc-by-4.0Sep 2024View details →

zenodo40/100

Metagenomic investigation of the faecal microbiomes of great tits and blue tits - supplementary sequences

<h2>Overview:</h2> The vertebrate gut microbiome plays crucial roles in host health and disease. However, there is limited data on the microbiomes of wild birds, most of which is restricted to barcode sequences. We therefore explored the use of shotgun metagenomics on the faecal microbiomes of two wild bird species widely used as model organisms in ecological studies: the great tit (Parus major) and the Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). Mitochondrial genomes from the host and eukaryotic pathogens that were assembled from these metagenomes and are made available as a catalogue in this archive. <h2>Methods:</h2> Metagenomic reads were trimmed, and quality controlled using FastP configured to a minimum phred score of 20 and minimum length of 50 bp. Individual sample assemblies were performed on each metagenomic sample using MEGAHIT v1.2.9. The BLAST 2.16 suite of programs was downloaded from ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast and used to perform homology searches of the assemblies, using the makeblastdb utility to generate libraries, the blastn and tblastx utilities to search contigs with query sequences under high stringency (e value ≥1*e-200) and the blastdbcmd utility to retrieve hits from databases. <h2>Files:</h2> <ul> <li>The Isospora_mitochondrial.fasta contains the fasta sequences for mitochondrial genomes of the bird pathogen Isospora sp, assembled from two faecal samples from the Great Tit (Parus major).</li> <li>The Cyanistes.caeruleus_mitochondrial.fasta contains the fasta sequences for mitochondrial genomes of the host bird, assembled from two faecal samples from the blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus).</li> <li>The Parus.major_mitochondrial.fasta contains the fasta sequences for mitochondrial genomes of the host bird, assembled from two faecal samples from the blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus).</li> </ul>

opencc-by-4.0Sep 2024View details →

dryad40/100

Inhibitory control, exploration behaviour and manipulated ecological context are associated with foraging flexibility in the great tit

Organisms are constantly under selection to respond effectively to diverse, sometimes rapid, changes in their environment, but not all individuals are equally plastic in their behaviour. Although cognitive processes and personality are expected to influence individual behavioural plasticity, the effects reported are highly inconsistent, which we hypothesise is because ecological context is usually not considered. We explored how one type of behavioural plasticity, foraging flexibility, was associated with inhibitory control (assayed using a detour-reaching task) and exploration behaviour in a novel environment (a trait closely linked to the fast-slow personality axis). We investigated how these effects varied across two experimentally manipulated ecological contexts, food value and predation risk. In the first phase of the experiment, we trained great tits Parus major to retrieve high value (preferred) food that was hidden in sand so that this became the familiar food source. In the second phase, we offered them the same familiar hidden food at the same time as a new alternative option that was visible on the surface, which was either high or low value, and under either high or low perceived predation risk. Foraging flexibility was defined as the proportion of choices made during four minute trials that were for the new alternative food source. Our assays captured consistent differences among individuals in foraging flexibility. Inhibitory control was associated with foraging flexibility - birds with high inhibitory control were more flexible when the alternative food was high value, suggesting they inhibited the urge to select the familiar food and instead selected the new food option. Exploration behaviour also predicted flexibility – fast explorers were more flexible, supporting the information gathering hypothesis. This tendency was especially strong under high predation risk, suggesting risk aversion also influenced the observed flexibility because fast explorers are risk prone and the new unfamiliar food was perceived to be the risky option. Thus, both behaviours predicted flexibility, and these links were at least partly dependent on ecological conditions. Our results demonstrate that an executive cognitive function (inhibitory control) and a behavioural assay of a well-known personality axis are both associated with individual variation in the plasticity of a key functional behaviour. That their effects on foraging flexibility were primarily observed as interactions with food value or predation risk treatments also suggests that the population level consequences of some behavioural mechanisms may only be revealed across key ecological conditions.

opencc-zeroOct 2021View details →

dryad40/100

Data from: Developmental stress does not induce genome-wide DNA methylation changes in wild great tit (Parus major) nestlings

The environment experienced during early life is a crucial factor in the life of many organisms. This early life environment has been shown to have profound effects on morphology, physiology and fitness. However, the molecular mechanisms that mediate these effects are largely unknown, even though this is essential for our understanding of the processes that induce phenotypic variation in natural populations. DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism that has been suggested to explain such environmentally induced phenotypic changes early in life. To investigate whether DNA methylation changes are associated with experimentally induced early developmental effects, we cross-fostered great tit (Parus major) nestlings and manipulated their brood sizes in a natural study population. We assessed experimental brood size effects on pre-fledging biometry and behaviour. We linked this to genome-wide DNA methylation levels of CpG sites in erythrocyte DNA, using 122 individuals and an improved epiGBS2 laboratory protocol. Brood enlargement caused developmental stress and negatively affected nestling condition, predominantly during the second half of the breeding season, when conditions are harsher. Brood enlargement, however, affected nestling DNA methylation in only one CpG site and only if hatch date was taken into account. In conclusion, this study shows that nutritional stress in enlarged broods does not associate with direct effects on genome-wide DNA methylation. Future studies should assess whether genome-wide DNA methylation variation may arise later in life as a consequence of phenotypic changes during early development.

opencc-zeroDec 2022View details →

dryad40/100

Data from: Both learning and syntax recognition are used by great tits when answering to mobbing calls

Mobbing behavior, in addition to its complex cooperative aspects, is particularly suitable to study the mechanisms implicated in heterospecific communication. Indeed, various mechanisms ranging from pure learning to innate recognition have been proposed. One promising, yet understudied mechanism could be syntax recognition, especially given the latest works published on syntax comprehension in birds. In this experiment, we test whether great tits use both learning and syntax recognition when responding to heterospecifics. In the first part of the experiment, we demonstrate that great tits show different responses to the same heterospecific calls depending on their sympatric status. In a second part, we explore the impact of reorganizing the notes of the heterospecific mobbing calls to fit the syntax of great tits. Great tits showed an increased mobbing response toward the heterospecific calls when they shared their own call organization. Our results corroborate the recent finding that syntactic rules in bird calls may have a strong impact on their communication systems and enlighten how various mechanisms can be used by the same species to respond to heterospecific calls.

opencc-zeroJul 2023View details →

dryad40/100