TY - JOUR
T1 - Parental care in an ecological perspective
T2 - A quantitative analysis of avian subfamilies
AU - Silver, Rae
AU - Andrews, Howard
AU - Ball, Gregory F.
N1 - Funding Information:
We wish to thank the following individ uals for invaluable discussions during the development of the ideas presented here and/or for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript: D. P. Crews, S. Lenington, W. A. Montevecchi, L. I. Silver, A. Storey, J. Wingfield and C. C. Wood. In addition, P. Shrout provided both theoretical insights and programming expertise that greatly enhanced our analysis of the data. The work was supported in part by grant 29830 NIMH (to R.S.).
PY - 1985
Y1 - 1985
N2 - The contribution of the male to the care of the young varies greatly within the class Aves. In this paper we use canonical correlation analysis to provide a quantitative framework for assessing the ecological and life history correlates of male involvement in five parental activities. The avian subfamily was used as the unit of analysis. Data were obtained from the existing literature. Four significant dimensions of relationship between the behavioral outcome variables and the ecological/life history predictors emerged from the analysis. Together, these dimensions accounted for 38% of the variability in the five paternal behaviors. The analysis indicated that the most powerful predictors of paternal behavior include mode of development, mating system, certain habitat characteristics, and clutch weight as a percentage of female body weight. The approach described here makes it possible to conduct formal quantitative tests of specific hypotheses widely discussed in the literature and to explore the existing data for important relationships that may have been overlooked in earlier work. The model also generates predictions about the behavior, ecology and life history of taxonomic groups about which little is currently known.
AB - The contribution of the male to the care of the young varies greatly within the class Aves. In this paper we use canonical correlation analysis to provide a quantitative framework for assessing the ecological and life history correlates of male involvement in five parental activities. The avian subfamily was used as the unit of analysis. Data were obtained from the existing literature. Four significant dimensions of relationship between the behavioral outcome variables and the ecological/life history predictors emerged from the analysis. Together, these dimensions accounted for 38% of the variability in the five paternal behaviors. The analysis indicated that the most powerful predictors of paternal behavior include mode of development, mating system, certain habitat characteristics, and clutch weight as a percentage of female body weight. The approach described here makes it possible to conduct formal quantitative tests of specific hypotheses widely discussed in the literature and to explore the existing data for important relationships that may have been overlooked in earlier work. The model also generates predictions about the behavior, ecology and life history of taxonomic groups about which little is currently known.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77957216460&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=77957216460&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/icb/25.3.823
DO - 10.1093/icb/25.3.823
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77957216460
SN - 1540-7063
VL - 25
SP - 823
EP - 840
JO - Integrative and Comparative Biology
JF - Integrative and Comparative Biology
IS - 3
ER -