Parental control: Ecology drives plasticity in parental response to offspring signals

Bird species differ in their parent-offspring interactions, and these differences may be caused by environmental variation. When food is plentiful, the chicks that are begging the most are fed the most. When food is scarce, bird species instead feed the largest offspring. While this variation could be due to parents responding to signalling differently based on food availability, it could equally be due to offspring adjusting their behaviour, to variation in information availability, or to confounding factors not related to the environment. We tested between these competing explanations experimentally, by manipulating food availability in a population of wild great tits, Parus major, while standardising offspring size and behaviour by creating mixed cross-fostered broods just before filming. To simulate variation in ecological conditions, we experimentally manipulated food availability in an alternating pattern: half of the broods received supplemental food (mealworms and waxworms) in a..., , # Parental control: Ecology drives plasticity in parental response to offspring signals

**Video File Overview**\
The data and code refers to videos of Parus major parents feeding chicks. The complete collection of videos can be found on Zenodo in two data depositories. The first (DOI [10.5281/zenodo.15625055](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15625055)) has videos  from nests A, AA, B, BB, C, CC, D, DD, E, EE, F, FF, G, H, I, J, K. The second (DOI [10.5281/zenodo.15625465](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15625465)) has videos from nests L, M, N, O P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. These files correspond to the variable \"Blinded.film.file\" which is the file name of the video data where each feeding visit can be found. They proceed in order, so C_2 is followed by C-3 and then by C-4, for example.  The first video for each nest \"_1\" is not included to give birds time to return to normal behavior after being disturbed during cross-fostering.

**DATA & CODE FILE OVERVIEW**
This data reposito...,