Latitudinal variations in incubation behaviour among uniparental incubating birds
Data files
Jan 29, 2025 version files 53.08 KB
Abstract
Uniparental incubating birds must resolve the trade-off between self-maintenance and incubation. This balance manifests through diverse incubation behaviours that vary significantly among species and geographic regions. However, limited research has examined the variability of incubation behaviours across species and regions. Using Bayesian phylogenetic mixed models, we investigated how three incubation behaviours (off-bout frequency, off-bout duration, and incubation constancy) vary with latitude across 201 uniparental incubating bird species. Our findings reveal distinct incubation strategies adopted by uniparental birds across latitudes. Species at lower latitudes exhibit fewer off-bouts and, meanwhile, have longer off-bout duration. Conversely, those at higher latitudes exhibit more frequent but shorter off-bouts. Notably, a clear latitude-dependent pattern emerges in incubation constancy, with higher latitudes showing greater incubation constancy. Additionally, smaller-bodied birds tend to take more frequent off-bouts. Significant variations in off-bout frequency were observed across different habitats. Herbivorous species, in particular, show higher incubation constancy compared to omnivorous and carnivorous birds. These findings offer valuable insights into the association of latitudinal variation with evolutionary dynamics of life histories in uniparental incubating birds.
README: Latitudinal Variations in Incubation Behaviour among Uniparental Incubating Birds
- Name of the journal: Journal of Animal Ecology
Description of the data and file structure
- File name: Rawdata.xlsx
- Description: a file containing scientific names, off-bout duration, off-bout frequency, incubation constancy, clutch size, incubating parent body mass and absolute latitude of 201 avian species, as well as references to these breeding information.
- Format(s): .xlsx
- Size(s): 43 KB
- Dimensions: 201 rows x 8 columns
- Variables:
- Species: scientific names for species.
- Off-bout duration (min): The mean minutes of all recesses taken over multiple days during the incubation period.
- Off-bout frequency (times): the average number of times that the incubating bird left the nest every 24 hours during the incubation period.
- Incubation constancy (%): the average proportion of time that the incubating bird spent on the nest every 24 hours during the incubation period. It was calculated as [(Day constancy * Day length hr) + (Night Constancy * Night length hr)]/24 hr.
- Clutch size: Average clutch size for each species.
- Body mass (g): Average incubating parent body mass for each species.
- Absolute latitude (°): Absolute values of latitude for geographic coordinates of each species.
Code/Software
Code for the article "Latitudinal Variations in Incubation Behaviour among Uniparental Incubating Birds"
Description of the data and file structure
- File name: Code for_Latitudinal Variations in Incubation Behaviour among Uniparental Incubating Birds.R
- Description: an R file containing code for data quantification, analysis, and visualization in the article "Latitudinal Variations in Incubation Behaviour among Uniparental Incubating Birds"
- Format(s): .R
- Software versions:
- RStudio version 2022.07.0+548
- R version 4.1.2
- Packages used:
- ape (Paradis E. & Schliep K. 2019. ape 5.0: an environment for modern phylogenetics and\ evolutionary analyses in R. Bioinformatics 35: 526-528.)
- rtrees (Li D. 2023. rtrees: an R package to assemble phylogenetic trees from megatrees. Ecography, 2023: e06643. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.06643)
- ggtree 3.3.0.900 (Guangchuang Yu. Using ggtree to visualize data on tree-like structures. Current Protocols in Bioinformatics, 2020, 69:e96. doi: 10.1002/cpbi.96)
- treeio 1.25.4 (LG Wang, TTY Lam, S Xu, Z Dai, L Zhou, T Feng, P Guo, CW Dunn, BR Jones, T Bradley, H Zhu, Y Guan, Y Jiang, G Yu*. treeio: an R package for phylogenetic tree input and output with richly annotated and associated data. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2020, 37(2):599-603.)
- ggtreeExtra 1.4.2 (S Xu, Z Dai, P Guo, X Fu, S Liu, L Zhou, W Tang, T Feng, M Chen, L Zhan, T Wu, E Hu, Y Jiang, X Bo, G Yu. ggtreeExtra: Compact visualization of richly annotated phylogenetic data. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2021, 38(9):4039-4042.)
- car 3.0.11 (John Fox and Sanford Weisberg (2019). An {R} Companion to Applied Regression, Third Edition. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. URL: https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Books/Companion/)
- phytools 0.7.90 (Revell, L. J. (2012) phytools: An R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol. Evol. 3 217-223. doi:10.1111/j.2041-210X.2011.00169.x)
- MCMCglmm (Hadfield, J.D. (2010). MCMC methods for multi-response generalized linear mixed models: the MCMCglmm R package. Journal of Statistical Software, 33, 1-22.)
- geiger 2.0.7 (Pennell Matthew W, Jonathan M Eastman, Graham J Slater, Joseph W Brown, Josef C Uyeda, Richard G FitzJohn, Michael E Alfaro, and Luke J Harmon. 2014. geiger v2.0: an expanded suite of methods for fitting macroevolutionary models to phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics 30:2216-2218.)
- tibble 3.1.6 (Müller K, Wickham H (2021). tibble: Simple Data Frames. R package version 3.1.6, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tibble.)