Data from: Early-life silver spoon improves survival and breeding performance of adult zebra finches

Data corresponds to: Wilson1 KM and NT Burley2. (2024). Early-life silver spoon improves survival and breeding performance of adult zebra finches. American Naturalist.

1Department of Biology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA. [e-mail]

2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA. [e-mail]

Developmental plasticity allows organisms to increase the fit between their phenotype and their early-life environment. The extent to which such plasticity also enhances adult fitness is not well understood, however, particularly when early-life and adult environments differ substantially.  Using a cross-factorial design that manipulated diet at two life stages, we examined predictions of major hypotheses – silver spoon, environmental matching, thrifty phenotype – concerning the joint impacts of early-life and adult diets on adult morphology/display traits, survival, and reproductive allocation. Overall, results aligned with the silver spoon hypothesis, which makes several predictions based on the premise that development in poor-quality environments constrains adult performance. Males reared and bred on the low-protein diet had lower adult survivorship than other male treatment groups; females’ survivorship was higher than males’ and not impacted by early diet. Measures of allocation to reproduction primarily reflected breeding diet, but where natal diet impacted reproduction, results supported the silver spoon. Both sexes showed reduced expression of display traits when reared on a low-protein diet. Results accord with other studies in supporting the relevance of the silver spoon hypothesis to birds and point to significant ramifications of sex differences in early-life viability selection on the applicability/strength of silver spoon effects.

Both authors were responsible for data collection and code writing.