Sex-specific nest attendance rhythm and foraging habitat use in a colony-breeding waterbird

Summary

In most colony-breeding species, biparental care during both egg incubation and chick-rearing is inevitable for successful reproduction, requiring parents to coordinate their nest attendance and foraging time. The extent to which the rhythm of nest attendance is adjusted to temporal and spatial variation in food availability is poorly understood. Here, we investigate whether the rhythm of
nest attendance interacts with the spatial and temporal availability of foraging habitats in Eurasian spoonbills Platalea leucorodiabreeding on Schiermonnikoog, a Dutch Wadden Sea barrier island. Spoonbills are tactile foragers that forage during both day and night in habitats of varying salinity. GPS-tracking combined with acceleration-based behavioral classifcation of 9 female and 13
male adult spoonbills between 2013 and 2019 revealed that, despite nearby foraging opportunities following a tidal rhythm, nest attendance followed a sex-specifc diel rhythm. During incubation and chick-rearing, females attended the nest at night and foraged during the day, while males showed the reverse rhythm. Females made more and shorter foraging trips to, almost exclusively,
nearby marine habitats, whereas the larger males often made long trips to forage in more distant freshwater habitats. Before and after breeding, females as well as males foraged primarily at night, suggesting that this is the preferred period of foraging for both sexes. Nevertheless, foraging habitat use remained sex-specifc, being most likely explained by size-dependent foraging techniques. To conclude, the sex-specifc rhythm of nest attendance is not shaped by the spatial and temporal availability of foraging habitats