Chick begging as a signal: are nestlings honest?

Chick begging as a signal: are nestlings honest?

Begging by dependent avian offspring is known to correlate with hunger level, and parents use this as a signal of brood demand to adjust their chick feeding behavior. While there is information on how each chick adjusts its begging to its own condition, little is known of how chicks adjust to the state of their nest mates. In two experiments we manipulated the competitive environment of individ...

Begging for control : when are offspring solicitation behaviours honest ?

Geoff A. Parker Population and Evolutionary Biology Research Group, Nicholson Building, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK L69 3GS. Ever since Trivers [1] showed that parents and their offspring could be in conflict over the amount of parental investment, the evolution and maintenance of begging behaviour has been an area of increasing interest to evolutionary...

Differences in begging behaviour between barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, nestlings.

Recent models of parent-offspring communication suggest that nestling begging reliably reflects food requirements, and therefore should increase with nestling need. Need may be affected by short-term variations in hunger, as well as by long-term factors such as relative size, growth rate and body condition. In the present study, the brood sizes of barn swallows were manipulated to create differ...

Can hungry nestlings be trained to reduce their begging?

Nestling begging behavior is usually characterized by a behavioral response of increasing begging levels with an increase in nestling need or hunger. Recent evidence for the possible effect of learning on begging intensity raises the question of how learning can shape this response rule. In particular, it is not clear whether hungry nestlings can learn to reduce their begging when it is not suc...

Manipulative begging by parasitic cuckoo nestlings and paradoxical host behaviour.