V. Heaney et P. Monaghan, OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF EFFORT BETWEEN REPRODUCTIVE PHASES - THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN INCUBATION COSTS AND SUBSEQUENT BROOD REARING CAPACITY, Proceedings - Royal Society. Biological Sciences, 263(1377), 1996, pp. 1719-1724
The optimal allocation of effort during reproduction is a key componen
t of life history theory, with tradeoffs predicted to operate both wit
hin and between reproductive attempts. Experimental work in this held
has largely concentrated on the latter. The need to partition investme
nt between different phases of reproduction, and how this varies betwe
en individuals, has received little empirical investigation. In this s
tudy, the costs of the incubation phase in common terns Sterna hirundo
were increased independently of those of the egg production and brood
rearing phases. Incubation of a clutch of three eggs, rather than the
two originally laid, reduced the subsequent capacity of parents to pr
ovision their brood of two, demonstrating an important trade-off betwe
en reproductive phases that has generally been omitted in estimations
of optimal clutch size. These results show for the first time that an
increase in the costs of incubation alone, which have often been consi
dered relatively trivial, can significantly depress parental performan
ce later in the same breeding attempt. The effect of increased incubat
ion costs was found to be most marked in the lower quality pairs, whic
h demonstrates that individuals differ in their capacity to compensate
for deviations from their allocation of effort to different reproduct
ive phases.