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| Provisioning in a Cooperative Bird with Multiple Breeding Females per Group |
| Colleen L Poje1,2, Derrick J Thrasher1,2, William E Feeney3,4, Michael S Webster1,2. 1Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States; 2Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, United States; 3Do�ana Biological Station (CSIC), Seville, Andalusia, Spain; 4Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia |
When reproduction is costly, maternal investment strategies are central to life-history decisions. Cooperative breeding can lead to a diversification of maternal investment strategies. This diversification hinges on the amount of help provided by the additional group members. Most studies of maternal investment in cooperative breeders have utilized kin-based systems where one breeding female dominates reproduction. Few studies have looked maternal investment in more genetically complex cooperative groups and how it is influenced by the addition of independently nesting co-breeding females. By studying variegated fairywrens, Malurus lamberti, we explore the impact of additional breeding females on maternal investment in a genetically complex system. We compared patterns of nestling provisioning by breeding females at their own nests in groups that were singular non-cooperative, singular cooperative (one breeding pair) or plural cooperative (multiple breeding pairs). Our findings suggest that the addition of breeding females to a social group may result in the loss of investment benefits seen when only one breeding female is present in a cooperative group. |