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Calcium effects on life-history traits in a wild population of the great tit (Parus major): analysis of long-term data at several spatial scales

  • Behavioral Ecology - Original Paper
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Abstract

Calcium is an essential micronutrient for birds during egg formation and for skeletal development in nestlings. Habitat level studies suggest that birds breeding in low-calcium areas may be limited in the size or number of eggs they lay and in the quality of their nestlings. However, as birds forage non-randomly and may travel considerable distances to acquire calcium, describing different breeding environments in terms of their calcium availability is problematic. Here we explore the spatial relationships between 300-fold variation in soil calcium and the life-history traits of ca. 6,000 pairs of great tits breeding in a single continuous woodland over 41 years. Controlling for other habitat differences, we found strong positive associations between soil calcium, clutch size and recruitment at spatial scales of over 300 m from each nestbox, suggesting that females may have been travelling inter-territorially to acquire calcium during egg formation. Soil calcium near each nestbox (mean distance = 58 m) was a strong positive predictor of mean fledgling mass, suggesting that local calcium was more important during nestling stages. We found no effect of soil calcium on lay-date or egg mass. This study is the first to provide evidence that small woodland passerines are limited by calcium availability at several different spatial scales. However, experimental work is necessary to test the causality of these spatial patterns.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many people who collected data during the long-term tit study at Wytham Woods. T.A.W. was supported by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) studentship and a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant, and D.G. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and by a BBSRC grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK

    Teddy Albert Wilkin, Andrew G. Gosler & Ben C. Sheldon

  2. Département de Biologie, Faculté des Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, J1K 2R1, Canada

    Dany Garant

  3. Centre for Ornithology, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    S. James Reynolds

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  1. Teddy Albert Wilkin
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  2. Andrew G. Gosler
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  3. Dany Garant
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  4. S. James Reynolds
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  5. Ben C. Sheldon
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Correspondence to Teddy Albert Wilkin.

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Communicated by Markku Orell.

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Wilkin, T.A., Gosler, A.G., Garant, D. et al. Calcium effects on life-history traits in a wild population of the great tit (Parus major): analysis of long-term data at several spatial scales. Oecologia 159, 463–472 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-008-1222-8

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