Survival, dispersal, and capture probability of male and female birds

In birds, observed adult sex ratios often are biased towards males. This bias could arise due to differences between sexes in dispersal or in catchability, but a preferred explanation has been sex differences in survival. However, most studies investigated apparent survival, in which differences in...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PeerJ preprints 2018-08
Main Authors: Lovász, Lilla, Roth, Tobias, Karcza, Zsolt, Lukács, Katalin Odett, Gyurácz, József, Amrhein, Valentin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Catchability
Dispersal
Females
Gender differences
Males
Probability
Sex differences
Survival
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In birds, observed adult sex ratios often are biased towards males. This bias could arise due to differences between sexes in dispersal or in catchability, but a preferred explanation has been sex differences in survival. However, most studies investigated apparent survival, in which differences in dispersal were not accounted for. Here, we used data from 24'830 captures of 11 bird species, collected at 40 Hungarian constant effort ringing sites, to estimate true survival, dispersal, and capture probability. On average, dispersal and capture probabilities were similar in both sexes. However, the probability to survive from one year to the next was 0.46 in males but only 0.37 in females, suggesting that higher female mortality may indeed be the most important predictor of male-biased adult sex ratios.
ISSN:2167-9843
DOI:10.7287/peerj.preprints.27090v1