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Bitter fruits of hard labour: Diet metabarcoding and telemetry reveal that urban songbirds travel further for lower-quality food

Jarrett, C.; Powell, L.L.; McDevitt, H.; Helm, B.; Welch, A.J.

Bitter fruits of hard labour: Diet metabarcoding and telemetry reveal that urban songbirds travel further for lower-quality food Thumbnail


Authors

C. Jarrett

L.L. Powell

H. McDevitt

B. Helm



Abstract

Rapidly increasing urbanisation requires mitigation against associated losses of biodiversity and species abundance. In urban-breeding birds, altered food availability for nestlings is thought to reduce reproductive success compared to forest populations. To compensate for shortages of preferred foods, urban parents could increase their search effort for optimal diets or provision other foods. Here, we used telemetry and faecal metabarcoding on blue tits from one urban and one forest populations to compare parental effort and comprehensively describe nestling diet. Urban parents travelled on average 30% further than those in the forest, likely to offset limited availability of high-quality nestling food (i.e. caterpillars) in cities. Metabarcoding, based on a mean number of 30 identified taxa per faeces, revealed that the diets of urban chicks were nonetheless substantially shifted to include alternative foods. While in the forest caterpillars comprised 82 ± 11% of taxa provisioned to nestlings, in the city they constituted just 44 ± 10%. Pre-fledging chick mass as well as offspring numbers were lower in urban than in forest-reared broods. Thus, at least in our comparison of two sites, the hard labour of urban parents did not fully pay off, suggesting that improved habitat management is required to support urban-breeding birds.

Citation

Jarrett, C., Powell, L., McDevitt, H., Helm, B., & Welch, A. (2020). Bitter fruits of hard labour: Diet metabarcoding and telemetry reveal that urban songbirds travel further for lower-quality food. Oecologia, 193(2), 377-388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04678-w

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 30, 2020
Online Publication Date Jun 13, 2020
Publication Date 2020-06
Deposit Date Jun 1, 2020
Publicly Available Date Jun 24, 2020
Journal Oecologia
Print ISSN 0029-8549
Electronic ISSN 1432-1939
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 193
Issue 2
Pages 377-388
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04678-w

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Advance online version This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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