Graduation Term
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
School of Biological Sciences
Committee Chair
Matthew Dugas
Abstract
Young animals often solicit care from their parents using behaviors and morphologies collectively termed begging, and for many nestling birds these begging displays include presenting their parents with vividly colored mouthparts. Mouth color is a complex trait that varies both across and within species, and different aspects of color may be under independent selection and serve different functions; the two primary proposed explanations for the evolution of mouth color are to increase nestling conspicuousness to parents and to provide parents with information about nestling quality. In addition to signals like mouth color, parents could also directly assess traits like nestling body size to obtain information about the relative value of their offspring. Understanding how selection acts on different aspects of color and how parents respond to both color and size is complicated by the fact that different aspects of color covary in natural mouth tissue, and some aspects of color can also be associated with nestling size. My work with the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) uses a combination of mouth color manipulations and observational work, paired with measurement of parental provisioning, to ask what selective pressures influence the evolution of different aspects of color and to disentangle parental response to body size vs mouth color.
Access Type
Dissertation-Open Access
Recommended Citation
Border, Shana, "Illuminating How Nestling Mouth Color and Body Size Shape Parental Care in a Cavity-Nesting Species" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 1887.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/1887
DOI
https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2024.20240618063947977453.999991