The energetic resources in an organism's environment are essential for executing a wide
range of life-history functions, including immunity and reproduction. Most energetic budgets …

The genetic covariation among different traits may cause the appearance of correlated
response to selection on multivariate phenotypes. Genes responsible for the expression of …

Survival of juveniles during the postfledging period can be markedly low, which may have
major consequences on avian population dynamics. Knowing which factors operating …

Post-fledging care constitutes a large proportion of the total costs of parental care in many
bird species. Despite being recognized as of critical importance to the survival of the …

The cost of reproduction is a key concept in life-history trade-offs. However, our
understanding of the reproductive costs is biased towards measures of reproductive effort …

Intrasexual competition in female birds is a widespread phenomenon but remains scarcely
explored. Females compete for limited resources and the expression of signals that indicate …

Strategies developed by organisms to maximize foraging efficiency have a strong influence
on fitness. The way in which the range of food resources is exploited has served to classify …

The intensity of color expression in animals plays a key role in social environments as a
mechanism to signal individual capacities in competitive contests. Selective pressures for …

Melanin is the most common pigment in animal integuments and is responsible for some of
the most striking ornaments. A central tenet of sexual selection theory states that melanin …

Most of our understanding of the function of colored traits displayed by birds and the
mechanisms that produce or maintain them comes from studies on adults. However, colored …