ABSTRACT
Incubating birds trade off self-maintenance for keeping eggs warm. This causes lower incubation temperature in more challenging conditions, with consequences for a range of offspring traits. It is not yet clear how low developmental temperature affects cold tolerance early in life. This is ecologically important because before full thermoregulatory capacity is attained, precocial chicks must switch between foraging and being brooded when their body temperature declines. Hence, we studied how cold tolerance during conditions similar to a feeding bout in the wild was affected by incubation temperature in Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica). Cold-incubated (35.5°C) chicks took the longest to develop, hatched at a smaller size, and remained smaller during their first week of life compared with chicks incubated at higher temperatures (37.0 and 38.5°C). This was reflected in increased cooling rate and reduced homeothermy, probably on account of reductions in both heat-producing capacity and insulation. Lower cold tolerance could exacerbate other temperature-linked phenotypic effects and, hence, also the trade-off between future and current reproduction from the perspective of the incubating parent.
Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: A.N., J.-Å.N.; Methodology: A.N., J.-Å.N.; Validation: A.N.; Formal analysis: A.N.; Investigation: A.N.; Resources: A.N., J.-Å.N.; Data curation: A.N.; Writing - original draft: A.N.; Writing - review & editing: A.N., J.-Å.N.; Visualization: A.N.; Project administration: A.N.; Funding acquisition: A.N., J.-Å.N.
Funding
A.N. was supported by the Birgit and Hellmuth Hertz Foundation/The Royal Physiographic Society of Lund (Kungliga Fysiografiska Sällskapet i Lund) (grant no. 2017-39034). J.-Å.N. was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet; grant no. 621-2006-2858 and 2016-04240).
Data availability
Data are available from figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12933191.v1
- Received September 15, 2020.
- Accepted November 20, 2020.
- © 2021. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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