Data from: Investment in Territorial Defence Relates to Recent Reproductive Success in Common Loons Gavia immer

Data from: Investment in Territorial Defence Relates to Recent Reproductive Success in Common Loons Gavia immer

Link to Full Text

Download Data Set

Description

As the value of a limited resource such as a territory increases, animals should invest more in the defence of that resource. Because reproductive success often depends on the quality of a breeding territory, reproductive success or failure may alter the perceived value of territory and affect an animal's investment in territorial defence. We used common loons (Gavia immer) to test the hypothesis that animals with recent breeding success would show stronger territorial defence than those with no recent breeding success. Surprisingly, successful loons responded less, not more, to a simulated intrusion. However, birds with success in the previous season also increased their territorial response as the breeding season progressed. In conjunction with past data showing that recently successful loons experience an increase in conspecific intrusions on their territories, we interpret our data to suggest that loons with recent success offset the cost of increased intrusions by adopting a more efficient strategy for territorial defence (e.g., limiting investment in resource defence until the time of the season when it is most critical).

Publication Date

6-28-2017

Keywords

Breeding success, common loon, Gavia immer, territorial behaviour

Disciplines

Biology | Poultry or Avian Science

Comments

Usage Notes

Common loon simulated territorial intrusion data

Data collected from field, uploaded as a .csv file. "Date" column is formatted as monthdayyear without spaces (e.g., april 16th 2016 is 41616). All behaviors are recorded as the number of times the behavior was observed, except for "Time" which is measured in seconds. All categorical variables are binomial -- a "0" indicates "No/Negative"; a "1" indicates "Yes/Affirmative". Binomial variables include both "Success" variables, "past_exposure" and "Physically_attacked_decoy". Loon data_to_submit.csv

Funding

National Science Foundation, Award: IBN-0316442

Copyright

This work is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license.

Data from: Investment in Territorial Defence Relates to Recent Reproductive Success in Common Loons Gavia immer
Access the publication accompanying this data

Share

COinS