Survival, dispersal, and capture probability of male and female birds

Zoological Institute, Universität Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Ringing Centre, BirdLife Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
Savaria Department of Biology, Eötvös Loránd University, Szombathely, Hungary
Swiss Ornithological Institute, Sempach, Switzerland
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27090v2
Subject Areas
Evolutionary Studies, Zoology
Keywords
dispersal, capture probability, site fidelity, true survival, Constant Effort Site (CES)
Copyright
© 2018 Lovász et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Lovász L, Roth T, Karcza Z, Lukács KO, Gyurácz J, Amrhein V. 2018. Survival, dispersal, and capture probability of male and female birds. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27090v2

Abstract

In birds, observed adult sex ratios often are biased towards males. This bias could arise due to differences between sexes in dispersal or in detectability / catchability, but a preferred explanation has been sex differences in survival. However, most studies investigated apparent survival, in which differences in dispersal were not accounted for. Here, we used data from 24'830 capturesof 11 bird species, collected at 40 Hungarian constant effort ringing sites, to estimate true survival, dispersal, and capture probability. On average, dispersal and capture probabilities were similar between sexes. However, the probability to survive from one year to the next was 0.46 in males but only 0.37 in females, suggesting that higher female mortality may indeed be the most important predictor of male-biased adult sex ratios.

Author Comment

This is a revision for "Royal Society Open Science".