Nest parasitism, promiscuity, and relatedness among wood ducks
Date
2021-12-02
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
PLOS ONE
Abstract
Nest parasitism is a common reproductive strategy used by many species of cavity nesting birds. Among these, the wood duck (Aix sponsa) is known to have evolved very specific strategies of when and whom to parasitize that is often based on population and/or environmental queues. Here, we investigated the genetic relationship of two female wood ducks competing over an artificial nesting box in Delaware, including the continued incubation of one female despite the death and body remains of the other female throughout the incubation process. We test whether such an extreme case of nest parasitism can be explained by relatedness, egg lineage composition, or a combination of other factors. To do so, we extracted genomic DNA from blood and tissue of the females, as well as chorioallantoic membranes of all viable and inviable eggs. Subsequently, we assessed relatedness among females and eggs based on hundreds of nuclear loci and the mitochondrial control region. We concluded that (1) the two incubating females were entirely unrelated, (2) the single clutch is in fact represented by a minimum of four unrelated females, and (3) a single female can lay eggs sired by different males. The latter finding is the first direct evidence for successful extra-pair copulation in wood ducks. With decreasing costs and increasing effectiveness, genomic methods have the potential to provide important insights into more complex ecological and evolutionary tactics of such populations.
Description
This project was funded, in part, through a grant from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service’s Wildlife & Sport Fish Restoration program under award number F19AF00963. We would also like to thank the Delaware Division of Fish & Wildlife for providing the necessary match to these Wildlife & Sport Fish Restoration program funds. We would also like to thank the University of Texas at El Paso, and the Border Biomedical Research Center at The University of Texas at El Paso NIH Grant #5G12RR007592. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords
eggs, Mitochondrial DNA, ducks, chicken eggs, clutches, bird eggs, parasitism, haplotypes, life on land
Citation
Harvey, Kayla, Philip Lavretsky, Justyn Foth, and Christopher K. Williams. “Nest Parasitism, Promiscuity, and Relatedness among Wood Ducks.” PLOS ONE 16, no. 12 (December 2, 2021): e0257105. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257105.