Quality vs. quantity:energetic and nutritional trade-offs in parental provisioning strategies

1. When faced with increased brood demand, parent birds provisioning young in the nest can make a variety of adjustments to their foraging and food allocation strategies. Logical extensions of classic optimal foraging theory predict increased provisioning effort to larger broods to be accompanied by changes in load size, foraging distance from the nest, as well as possible changes in the type and size of prey delivered. 2. We assessed such behavioural adjustments and their consequences in pairs of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) responding to a range of experimental brood sizes. Parents feeding larger broods increased their visit rates by spending less time in the nestbox and less time around the nestbox colony. High visit rates to larger broods were also associated with larger loads per visit and changes in the type of prey delivered to the nest. As a consequence, chicks in large and small broods received similar rates of food intake, but experienced differences in the nutritional quality of their food. Parents feeding larger brood sizes were able to increase their provisioning effort despite feeding in the same foraging sites, travelling at comparable flight speeds and maintaining similar body masses to parents feeding smaller broods. 3. Parental energetic expenditure, measured through doubly labelled water analyses, showed no effect of the brood size treatment. The greater proportion of indigestible material per gram of food delivered to the larger experimental brood sizes (i.e. soil from the guts of earthworms) was probably responsible for the fact that these chicks grew at slower rates and fledged at lower body masses, although we cannot rule out the possibility of lower growth rates due to higher energetic costs of sibling competition within larger broods. Lighter fledglings from large broods disappeared from the local area earlier in the summer, probably as a result of differential mortality rather than premature natal dispersal. 4. We discuss the adaptive significance of the provisioning trade-off between quantity and quality of food items delivered by parents to the nest, with reference to natural variation in foraging conditions and brood demand