Data from: Wood ducks and hooded mergansers as interspecific brood parasites: An evaluation of parasitic egg survival
Data files
Aug 08, 2024 version files 122.99 KB
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cleanData6.6.24.csv
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README.md
Abstract
Conspecific and interspecific brood parasitism are alternate reproductive strategies more pervasive in waterfowl than in any other group of birds. While previous research has measured costs incurred by nest hosts incubating parasitized clutches, few studies have focused on the relative success of parasites. Here, we evaluated the success of wood duck (Aix sponsa) and hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus) eggs laid parasitically in Louisiana and Mississippi. We monitored nest boxes, assigned eggs in each nest as host or parasitic, and determined the number of eggs that hatched and failed. Across all study areas (1994–1999 and 2020–2023), we monitored 1750 wood duck and 377 hooded merganser nests; ~13% of wood duck and ~24% of hooded merganser nests were interspecifically parasitized. We modeled egg survival of 2925 host and 691 parasitic eggs from 197 successful nests (≥1 hatched egg, regardless of species). Wood duck eggs laid in hooded merganser nests had lower survival [0.293, CI = 95% credible intervals (after, CI) = 0.176, 0.439] than hooded merganser eggs (0.762, CI = 0.704, 0.810) laid in wood duck nests. Clutch size negatively influenced parasitic wood duck egg survival (β = −.24, CI = −0.39, −0.10) but had a slight positive influence on parasitic hooded merganser eggs (β = .08, CI = 0.04, 0.12). Our results revealed that hooded merganser eggs experience higher success when laid parasitically in wood duck nests, whereas wood duck eggs experience lower success when laid parasitically in hooded merganser nests. Our results reveal new complexity in waterfowl interspecific brood parasitism, where the success of parasitic eggs is species‐, host‐, and context‐specific.
README: Data from: Wood ducks and hooded mergansers as interspecific brood parasites: An evaluation of parasitic egg survival
Article DOI
Cite this dataset
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0k6djhb8q
Metadata used for evaluating the survival of parasitic wood duck and hooded merganser eggs laid interspecifically; published by Bakner et al. 2024.
This manuscript has been accepted for publication by Ecology and Evolution in 2024.
DATAFILES
This file contains R code that can be used to reproduce the analysis and numbers listed in the results section of manuscript. Stored on Zenodo
This file is the data frame that can be read into program R to execute the code file listed above. This data frame contains several columns which are described below:
- id - nest identifier
- HOST - nest host with "1" = wood duck and "2" = hooded merganser
- Nest - type of nest with "WD" = wood duck nest containing only wood duck eggs, "HM" = hooded merganser nest containing on hooded merganser eggs, and "MI" = nests containing both wood duck and hooded merganser eggs
- type - indicates whether the row contains information on host eggs or parasitic (listed in data frame as "parasite") eggs
- STUDY - study site identifier
- State - state identifier
- clutch - total number of eggs in clutch
- hatch - total number of eggs that hatched from clutch
- total_clutch - total number of eggs in clutch (i.e., host and parasitic combined)
- NESTFATE - indicates weather the nest hatched at least 1 egg or failed completely
- inc - indicates weather a clutch was incubated or not
- BOX_TYPE - indicates nest box size