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Cooperatively breeding carrion crows adjust offspring sex ratio according to group composition

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Abstract

In cooperatively breeding species, parents should bias offspring sex ratio towards the philopatric sex to obtain new helpers (helper repayment hypothesis). However, philopatric offspring might increase within-group competition for resources (local resource competition hypothesis), diluting the benefits of helper acquisition. Furthermore, benefits of offspring sex bias on parents’ fitness may depend on different costs of production and/or different breeding opportunities of sons and daughters. Because of these counteracting factors, strategies of offspring sex allocation in cooperative species are often difficult to investigate. In carrion crows Corvus corone corone in northern Spain, sons are more philopatric and more helpful at the nest than daughters, which disperse earlier and have higher chances to find a breeding vacancy. Consistent with the helper repayment hypothesis, we found that crows fledged more sons in groups short of subordinate males than in groups with sufficient helper contingent, where daughters were preferred. Crow females also proved able to bias primary sex ratio, allocating offspring sex along the hatching sequence in a way that provided the highest fledging probability to sons in the first breeding attempt and to daughters in the following ones. The higher cost of producing male offspring may explain this pattern, with breeding females shifting to the cheapest sex (female) as a response to the costs generated by previous reproductive attempts. Our results suggest complex adjustments of offspring sex ratio that allowed crows to maximize the value of daughters and sons.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to two anonymous referees for useful comments on the manuscript and to N. Remón, A. Guerrero and R. García for help in the lab. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the project grant CGL2008-01829BOS (to VB), “Juan de la Cierva” program-FSE (to DC) and the Xunta de Galicia (Isidro Parga Pondal program to MV). All bird manipulations were authorized by Junta de Castilla y León.

Ethical standards

Bird manipulations (including measuring, banding, and blood sampling) provoked no permanent damage to adults or chicks (see methods for details), comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed (Spain) and were authorized by Junta de Castilla y León.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit of Biodiversity (CSIC, UO, PA), University of Oviedo, Mieres, Spain

    Daniela Canestrari

  2. Department of Agro-forestry, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain

    José M. Marcos & Vittorio Baglione

  3. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain

    Marta Vila

  4. Sustainable Forest Management Research Institute, Valladolid, Spain

    Vittorio Baglione

  5. Research Unit of Biodiversity (CSIC, UO, PA), Universidad de Oviedo—Campus de Mieres, Edificio de Investigación—5a planta, C. Gonzalo Gutiérrez Quirós s/n, 33600, Mieres, Spain

    Daniela Canestrari

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  1. Daniela Canestrari
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  2. Marta Vila
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  4. Vittorio Baglione
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Correspondence to Daniela Canestrari.

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Communicated by D. Rubenstein

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Canestrari, D., Vila, M., Marcos, J.M. et al. Cooperatively breeding carrion crows adjust offspring sex ratio according to group composition. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 66, 1225–1235 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-012-1375-7

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