Birds found to put more energy into current brood when ill

[PhysOrg]

(PhysOrg.com) -- In an interesting study designed to find out how birds make choices, whether consciously or not, about how much effort to expend on offspring when ill, a team from Illinois University has found that at least for house wrens, giving their all up front makes more sense than saving their strength to recover and reproduce another day. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team explains how they analyzed the birds’ decision-making by artificially inducing illness symptoms in a group of wrens and then measuring their offspring for robustness.

 

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