Carotenoid-based colours are recognized as having an important signalling function, yet the nature of the mechanisms that maintain their honesty is not well understood. By combining a carotenoid-feeding experiment with a quantitative genetic experiment in a wild population of blue tits (Parus caeruleus), we were able to test predictions that differentiate between proposed mechanisms. If variati...

Earlier phylogenetic analyses of the marine Rhodobacteraceae (class Alphaproteobacteria) genera Leisingera and Phaeobacter indicated that neither genus might be monophyletic. We here used phylogenetic reconstruction from genome-scale data, MALDI-TOF mass-spectrometry analysis and a re-assessment of the phenotypic data from the literature to settle this matter, aiming at a reclassification of th...

We compared the ability of coal tits, Parus ater (a food-storing species), great tits, P. major, and blue tits, P. caeruleus (two nonstoring species) to remember spatial locations in a spatial delayed-matching-to-sample task. Presentation of a single sample image on a touch screen was followed by a choice phase containing two, three or four images, in which the bird had to choose the original i...

It has been hypothesized that parents increase their fitness by biasing the sex ratio of extra-pair offspring (EPO) towards males. Here, we report a male bias among EPO in a wild population of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). This resulted from a decline in both the proportion of males and EPO over the laying order of eggs in the clutch. However, previous studies suggest that, unlike the declin...