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1 August 2009 Fecal-Sac Ingestion by Spotted Towhees
Jenny E. McKay, Michael T. Murphy, Sarah Bartos Smith, Jennifer K. Richardson
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Abstract

Altricial nestlings encase excrement in fecal sacs that parents remove by either ingesting them or transporting them away from the nest. Ingestion may allow energetically or nutritionally deprived parents to recapture energy or nutrients that might be lost because of nestlings' inefficient digestion (the “parental-nutrition hypothesis”), but ingestion may also permit parents to avoid flights from the nest that interfere with parental care (e.g., brooding young; the “economic-disposal hypothesis”). We used a hypothetico-deductive approach to test the two hypotheses' ability to account for fecal-sac ingestion by the Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus). We confirmed the parental-nutrition hypothesis' predictions that more fecal sacs should be ingested in years of food shortage (males only), late in the season when food supplies decline (both sexes), by parents that had the greatest difficulty raising young (i.e., underweight young), and that adults' body condition should vary directly with their rate of fecal-sac ingestion (females only). We rejected the economic-disposal hypothesis' prediction of a decline in fecal-sac ingestion with increasing brood size. The latter, plus the observation that nearly 40% of males ingest fecal sacs despite their spending virtually no time attending nests, suggests that fecal-sac ingestion is not a mechanism to avoid needless and time-consuming flights from the nest that interfere with parental care. Fecal-sac ingestion by Spotted Towhees is better interpreted as either a resource supplement to parents or as a mechanism to satiate hunger so that parents can maintain rates of feeding to dependent young.

© 2009 by The Cooper Ornithological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.
Jenny E. McKay, Michael T. Murphy, Sarah Bartos Smith, and Jennifer K. Richardson "Fecal-Sac Ingestion by Spotted Towhees," The Condor 111(3), 503-510, (1 August 2009). https://doi.org/10.1525/cond.2009.080065
Received: 29 October 2008; Accepted: 1 April 2009; Published: 1 August 2009
KEYWORDS
coprophagy
economic-disposal hypothesis
fecal sacs
nest sanitation
parental behavior
parental-nutrition hypothesis
Pipilo maculatus
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