Data from: Nest attentiveness drives nest predation in arctic sandpipers

Most birds incubate their eggs to allow embryo development. This behaviour
limits the ability of adults to perform other activities. Hence,
incubating adults trade-off incubation and nest protection with foraging
to meet their own needs. Parents can either cooperate to sustain this
trade-off or incubate alone. The main cause of reproductive failure at
this reproductive stage is predation and adults reduce this risk by
keeping the nest location secret. Arctic sandpipers are interesting
biological models to investigate parental care evolution as they may use
several parental care strategies. The three main incubation strategies
include both parents sharing incubation duties (“biparental”), one parent
incubating alone (“uniparental”), or a flexible strategy with both
uniparental and biparental incubation within a population (“mixed”). By
monitoring the incubation behaviour in 714 nests of seven sandpiper
species across 12 arctic sites, we studied the relationship between
incubation strategy and nest predation. First, we described how the
frequency of incubation recesses (NR), their mean duration (MDR), and the
daily total duration of recesses (TDR) vary among strategies. Then, we
examined how the relationship between the daily predation rate and these
components of incubation behaviour varies across strategies using two
complementary survival analysis. For uniparental and biparental species,
the daily predation rate increased with the daily total duration of
recesses and with the mean duration of recesses. In contrast, daily
predation rate increased with the daily number of recesses for biparental
species only. These patterns may be attributed to two independent
mechanisms: cryptic incubating adults are more difficult to locate than
unattended nests and adults departing the nest or feeding close to the
nest can draw predators' attention. Our results demonstrate that
incubation behaviour as mediated by incubation strategy has important
consequences for sandpipers’ reproductive success.