Data from: Nest attentiveness drives nest predation in arctic sandpipers ...

• Main Authors: Meyer, Nicolas, Bollache, Loïc, Dechaume-Moncharmont, François-Xavier, Moreau, Jerôme, Afonso, Eve, Angerbjörn, Anders, Bety, Joël, Ehrich, Dorothee, Gilg, Vladimir, Giroux, Marie-Andrée, Hansen, Jannik, Lanctot, Richard, Lang, Johannes, Lecomte, Nicolas, McKinnon, Laura, Reneerkens, Jeroen, Saalfeld, Sarah, Sabard, Brigitte, Schmidt, Niels, Sittler, Benoît, Smith, Paul, Sokolov, Aleksandr, Sokolov, Vasiliy, Sokolova, Natalya, Van Bemmelen, Rob, Gilg, Olivier
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2020
• Subjects: nest survival; breeding behaviour; incubation strategy; incubation recesses; Arctic shorebirds; Arctic; Calidris alba; Calidris alpina; Dunlin; Sanderling
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbrx2; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbrx2

Most birds incubate their eggs to allow embryo development. This behaviour limits the ability of adults to perform other activities. Hence, incubating adults trade-off incubation and nest protection with foraging to meet their own needs. Parents can either cooperate to sustain this trade-off or incubate alone. The main cause of reproductive failure at this reproductive stage is predation and adults reduce this risk by keeping the nest location secret. Arctic sandpipers are interesting biological models to investigate parental care evolution as they may use several parental care strategies. The three main incubation strategies include both parents sharing incubation duties (“biparental”), one parent incubating alone (“uniparental”), or a flexible strategy with both uniparental and biparental incubation within a population (“mixed”). By monitoring the incubation behaviour in 714 nests of seven sandpiper species across 12 arctic sites, we studied the relationship between incubation strategy and nest predation. ... : Study sites The study was conducted at 12 sites across the Arctic (Figure 1) during the summers of 2016 to 2018. Field sessions began in June at the southernmost sites and early July at the high-arctic sites. Nest monitoring At each site, we monitored the incubation behaviour of one to three species of sandpipers (seven species in total). Three species are uniparental (little stint Calidris minuta, Temminck’s stint Calidris temminckii and white-rumped sandpiper Calidris fuscicollis), three species are biparental (dunlin Calidris alpina, Baird’s sandpiper Calidris bairdii and semipalmated sandpiper Calidris pusilla), and one species, the sanderling (Calidris alba), exhibits a mixed strategy with nests incubated by either two or only one adult in the same population (Reneerkens et al. 2011, Moreau et al. 2018). All species lay a typical clutch of four eggs (rarely three or five) in a shallow nest scrape directly on the tundra’s surface (Reid et al. 2002). Nests were located opportunistically by walking through ...