Parental care compromises feeding in the pumpkinseed fish (Lepomis gibbosus)
Abstract
Providing parental care is potentially costly. Costs can arise through elevated energy expenditure or from an increased risk of mortality. A cost of parental care can also occur because a parent is compromised in their ability to forage. We used pumpkinseed Lepomis gibbosus, a fish with an alternative male mating strategy, to test whether parental males differed in their feeding in comparison with females and cuckolder males. To address this question, we examined the stomach contents of female, cuckolder male, and parental male pumpkinseed during the breeding season over an entire diel cycle. We showed that parental males had a lower total weight of food in their stomachs in comparison with females, while cuckolder males did not. Parental males also had a lower weight and number of chironomids in their stomachs. The temporal pattern of feeding of parental males diverged from that of females, and they had a lower probability of pupal chironomids in their stomachs, which implies spatial segregation in foraging. Parental males had a greater probability of conspecific eggs in their stomachs than females, while the probability of egg cannibalism did not differ between cuckolder males and females. Overall, these finding meet predictions in accordance with an assumption that parental care and territoriality can compromise feeding.
Citation
Zięba , G , Dukowska , M , Przybylski , M , Fox , M & Smith , C H 2018 , ' Parental care compromises feeding in the pumpkinseed fish ( Lepomis gibbosus ) ' , Naturwissenschaften , vol. 105 , 26 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-018-1554-0
Publication
Naturwissenschaften
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0028-1042Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appro- priate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
This study was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (decision No DEC-2011/01/D/NZ8/01807) (to GZ).Collections
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