Do parasites and antioxidant availability affect begging behaviour, growth rate and resistance to oxidative stress?

Early-life trade-offs faced by developing offspring can have long-term consequences for their future fitness. Young offspring use begging displays to solicit resources from their parents and have been selected to grow fast to maximize survival. However, growth and begging behaviour are generally traded-off against self-maintenance. Oxidative stress, a physiological mediator of life-history trade-offs, may play a major role in this trade-off by constraining, or being costly to, growth and begging behaviour. Yet, despite implications for the evolution of life-history strategies and parent-offspring conflicts, the interplay between growth, begging behaviour and resistance to oxidative stress remains to be investigated.
We experimentally challenged wild great tit (Parus major) offspring by infesting nests with a common ectoparasite, the hen flea (Ceratophyllus gallinae), and simultaneously tested for compensating effects of increased vitamin E availability, a common dietary antioxidant. We...