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- Title
Testosterone and the allocation of reproductive effort in male house finches ( Carpodacus mexicanus).
- Authors
Stoehr, A. M.; Hill, G. E.
- Abstract
Testosterone has been proposed to serve as the mediator that controls the relative effort that an individual male bird will devote to mating effort versus parental effort. Here, we demonstrate a testosterone-influenced trade-off between parental and mating efforts in male house finches. Male house finches with experimentally elevated testosterone fed nestlings at a significantly lower rate, but sang at a higher rate than males without manipulated testosterone levels. Females mated to testosterone-implanted males fed nestlings at a significantly higher rate than females mated to males without testosterone implants, resulting in similar feeding rates for both treated and untreated pairs. The effects of testosterone on male house finches, however, were not as dramatic as the effects of testosterone observed in some other socially monogamous species of birds. Because extra-pair copulations are uncommon in house finches and males provide substantial amounts of parental care, these more modest effects may be due to differences in how the allocation of reproductive effort affects the costs and benefits of different reproductive behaviors.
- Subjects
HOUSE finch; SEX allocation; TESTOSTERONE; ANIMAL sexual behavior; ANIMAL feeding behavior; ANIMAL behavior
- Publication
Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, 2000, Vol 48, Issue 5, p407
- ISSN
0340-5443
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s002650000247