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Spying on your neighbours? Social information affects timing of breeding and stress hormone levels in a colonial seabird

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Abstract

A good overlap between offspring energetic requirements and availability of resources is required for successful reproduction. Accordingly, individuals from numerous species fine-tune their timing of breeding by integrating cues that predict environmental conditions during the offspring period. Besides acquiring information from their direct interaction with the environment (personal information), individuals can integrate information by observing the behaviours or performance of others (social information). The use of social information is often beneficial because the accumulated knowledge of conspecifics may represent a source of information more reliable than the intrinsically more limited personal information. However, although social information constitutes the major source of information in a wide range of contexts, studies investigating its use in the context of timing of breeding are scarce. We investigated whether black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) used social information to adjust the timing of egg-laying. We manipulated social information using a food-supplementation experiment, known to advance kittiwakes' reproductive phenology. We expected food-supplemented and unsupplemented pairs to delay and advance, respectively, their timing of laying when surrounded by a majority of neighbours from the opposite food-treatment. However, both unsupplemented and food-supplemented kittiwakes delayed egg-laying when surrounded by a higher proportion of neighbours from the opposite food-treatment. This result shows that kittiwakes use social information to time egg-laying, but that it is not used to match the seasonal peak of food availability. We suggest that when social and personal cues give contradictory environmental information, individuals may benefit from delaying laying to gather more information to make better decisions about investment into eggs. Further, we explored a potential proximate mechanism for the pattern we report. We show that baseline corticosterone, known to mediate reproductive decisions, was lower in unsupplemented females facing a higher proportion of food-supplemented neighbours. Altogether, our results suggest that to fine-tune their timing of laying, kittiwakes use complex decision-making processes in which social and personal information interplay.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lena Agdere, Elise Albert, Romain Durieux, Laurent Gaillard, Emilie Lefol and Emmanuelle Voisin for their help in the field. At the CEBC we thank Colette Trouvé and Charline Parenteau for corticosterone assay. We thank Jean-Baptiste Ferdy, François Rousset and Thierry Onkelinx for their help in statistical analyses.

Funding

The study was financed by a 4-year grant from the French Polar Institute Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV ‘Programme 1162 SexCoMonArc’), and is part of the ‘Laboratoire d'Excellence’ (LABEX) entitled TULIP (ANR-10-LABX-41).

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Author notes

  1. Thomas Merkling

    Present address: Centre d’Investigations Cliniques-Plurithématique 1433, Inserm U1116, CHRU Nancy, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Évolution & Diversité Biologique (UMR 5174), CNRS, IRD, UPS, 118 Rte de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse, France

    Anika Immer, Thomas Merkling, Etienne Danchin, Pierrick Blanchard & Sarah Leclaire

  2. Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé (CEBC), UMR 7372 – CNRS & La Rochelle Université, 79360, Villiers-en-Bois, France

    Olivier Chastel

  3. Alaska Science Center, US Geological Survey, 4210 University Drive, Anchorage, AK, 99508, USA

    Scott A. Hatch

  4. Institute for Seabird Research and Conservation, 12850 Mountain Place, Anchorage, AK, 99516, USA

    Scott A. Hatch

Author notes

  1. Anika Immer and Thomas Merkling have contributed equally to this work.

    • Pierrick Blanchard and Sarah Leclaire are co-last authors.

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      This experiment was conducted under the approval of the USGS Alaska Science Center Animal Care and Use Committee, in accordance with US law and under permits from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (No. MB210495) and the State of Alaska (No. 11–108 and No. 12–115-A1). All data, code and models that were used to generate results, figures and tables presented in the main text and supplementary information are available to download from dedicated repositories on the Open Science Framework (Merkling et al. 2020).

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      Immer, A., Merkling, T., Chastel, O. et al. Spying on your neighbours? Social information affects timing of breeding and stress hormone levels in a colonial seabird. Evol Ecol 35, 463–481 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-021-10112-1

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