A study coordinated by the Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC) and the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (IPE-CSIC) shows that the physical attractiveness of birds does not determine their reproductive success.
The results, contrary to expectations, demonstrated that the density of mates and competitors did not influence whether the most attractive males had more or fewer descendants .

Parasitoid wasps may act as hyperparasites and sometimes regulate the populations of their hosts by a top-down dynamic. Nasonia vitripennis is a generalist gregarious parasitoid that parasitizes several host flies, including the blowfly Protocalliphora, which in turn parasitizes bird nestlings. Nonetheless, the ecological factors underlying N. vitripennis prevalence and parasitoidism intensity on its hosts in natural populations are poorly understood. The prevalence of N. vitripennis in...

Long-term monitoring of individually marked animals is usually required for reliable estimation of numerous life history parameters. However, capture, marking and manipulation can dramatically alter the animals' behaviour after capture, and thus affect subsequent recapture success. Here, a pied flycatcher population was used as an example to illustrate the sampling bias resulting from the repeated capture of free-ranging individuals.

In this study, a cross-fostering experiment was conducted between an oakwood and an adjacent conifer plantation to investigate the role of early experience and genetic background in habitat selection in a pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) population.

Many theoretical models on the evolution of nestling begging assume this behavior is costly, so that only nestlings in real need of food would profit from giving intensive signals to parents. However, evidence accumulated for the last 2 decades is either contradictory (growth costs) or scant (immunological cost). Here, the existence of both costs is experimentally tested in pied flycatcher nestlings.