Parents, Nestlings and Feeding Frequency: A Model of Optimal Parental Investment and Implications for Avian Reproductive Strategies
Parents, Nestlings and Feeding Frequency: A Model of Optimal Parental Investment and Implications for Avian Reproductive Strategies
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父母、雏鸟和喂养频率：最佳父母投资模型及其对鸟类繁殖策略的影响
DOI：
10.1007/978-1-4613-1839-2_15
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发表时间：
1987
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
N. Nur
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
N. Nur
Traditionally. students of foraging behavior have been concerned with determining" what animals feed on. where they go to feed. and how they search for food"(Krebs, Stephens & Sutherland 1983. p. 166). None of these traditional subjects will be discussed in much detail in this chapter. Instead I focus on the question of how often parents feed their young. For students of foraging behavior. this is a valuable question for two reasons.(1) To understand an animal's foraging behavior we must understand, not only the decision of which items to harvest while foraging. but also the decision whether to forage or to perform some other activity.(2) For parents with (helpless) nestling young. food items harvested may either be consumed by the parent or brought back to the nest for the young. Thus the parent must always decide between maintaining itself or investing in its current offspring. The evidence presented here is that the levels of self-feeding and brood-feeding are not fixed but are the results of a dynamic process. Moreover. evidence presented here suggests that choice of prey items is affected by the level of brood-feeding.Parental feeding frequency is useful to consider in another respect. To develop an adequate understanding of the evolution of any behavior requires that we explicitly relate the consequences of the behavior to Darwinian fitness. In this chapter I try to show that establishing the relation of parental feeding behavior to fitness is a tractable task. That is. it is possible to evaluate the consequences of feeding the brood at a
