How did the Great Auk raise its young?
Abstract The extant auks show three strategies of chick rearing – precocial (chicks leave the nest site when a few days old), intermediate (young raised to a mass of around 20% of adult mass) and semi‐precocial (young raised to a mass of around 65% of adult mass). It is not known which strategy the...
| Published in: | Journal of Evolutionary Biology |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press (OUP)
2010
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02047.x https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1420-9101.2010.02047.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02047.x |
| Summary: | Abstract The extant auks show three strategies of chick rearing – precocial (chicks leave the nest site when a few days old), intermediate (young raised to a mass of around 20% of adult mass) and semi‐precocial (young raised to a mass of around 65% of adult mass). It is not known which strategy the extinct Great Auk used. In this paper, we investigate this issue by a novel combination of a time and energy budget model and phylogenetic comparison. The first approach indicates that for reasonable estimates of the equation parameters, the Great Auk could have followed an intermediate strategy. For a limited range of parameters, the Great Auk could have followed the semi‐precocial strategy. Phylogenetic comparison shows that it is unlikely that the Great Auk followed a precocial strategy. The results suggest that the Great Auk followed an intermediate strategy as does its presumed closest extant relative the Razorbill. |
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