Survival, dispersal, and capture probability of male and female birds
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Zoology
- Keywords
- dispersal, capture probability, site fidelity, constant effort site (CES), true survival
- 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
- 2018. Survival, dispersal, and capture probability of male and female birds. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27090v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27090v1
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 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 captures of 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 in both 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 manuscript has been submitted to the Royal Society Open Science.