Why don female purple sandpipers perform brood care?
Author InfoElin P. Pierce Lewis W. Oring Eivin Røskaft Jan T. Lifjeld Abstract In most monogamous sandpiper species, females share parental care but leave the brood earlier than males, a feature unusual among birds in general. In the purple sandpiper (Calidris maritima), females almost always leave the brood at hatching and never share brood care. Males perform uniparental brood care from hatching until well after fledging. In this paper, we report the results of a mate-removal experiment conducted on the purple sandpiper in high Arctic Svalbard and discuss the implications for the evolution of their mate desertion strategy. By removing males from nests near hatching, we tested 2 hypotheses: 1) Males assume brood care because females, who always have a net benefit from deserting, have a fixed brood desertion strategy, whereas males do not; 2) females desert the brood because they cannot perform uniparental brood care as well as males and/or because they are under physiological stress a
