Authors: Marta Giordano David Costantini Joel L Pick Barbara Tschirren
Publish Date: 2015/03/06
Volume: 69, Issue: 5, Pages: 777-785
Abstract
Oxidative stress has been suggested as a mechanism underlying the costs of reproduction and life history tradeoffs Reproductive activities may lead to high production of prooxidants whose activity can generate oxidative damage when not countered by adequate antioxidant defenses Because interindividual differences in the efficiency of the antioxidant system are influenced by an individual’s diet food availability experienced during reproduction may affect the females’ antioxidant status and in birds their ability to transfer antioxidants into their eggs Moreover a female’s ability to cope with oxidative stress has been suggested to influence pigment deposition in the eggshell suggesting a possible signaling function of eggshell maculation Here we performed a food supplementation experiment in a natural population of great tits Parus major in order to investigate how nutritional conditions experienced during the egg laying period affect the female’s oxidative status and egg investment and how maternal oxidative status and egg antioxidant protection relate to eggshell pigmentation We show that foodsupplemented females had lower oxidative damage levels ROMs than nonfoodsupplemented females Furthermore a female’s ROMs levels were negatively associated with the levels of yolk antioxidant protection in her eggs but this negative association was only significant in nonfoodsupplemented females This suggests that oxidative stress experienced during reproduction influences the allocation of antioxidants into the eggs Moreover we observed a positive relationship between eggshell pigment distribution and maternal and yolk antioxidant protection suggesting that eggshell pigmentation is a cue of female and offspring qualityWe thank Martina Keller Kathrin Näpflin and Jamal Hanafi for field assistance and help in the lab and three anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript This research was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant PP00P3 128386 to BT
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