Variance partitioning of nest provisioning rates in blue tits: individual repeatability, heritability and partner interactions

In many animal species, including most birds, parental care is performed by both parents, which has important implications for mate choice (good parent hypothesis) and parental investment strategies. Partitioning the variance in measures of parental care into heritable and non-heritable components is important to understand the evolvability of parental investment and its potential role in mate choice. We employed an automated system to monitor provisioning behavior at 817 blue tit nests over 10 years (totaling ~3 million visits). Daily provisioning rates of males and females were moderately repeatable between years (Radj = 0.16 and 0.15 respectively), which was almost entirely explained by additive genetic effects. While this degree of heritability is sufficient for parental investment to respond to selection, we argue that the modest level of repeatability provides limited potential for a ‘provisioning phenotype’ to be used as a criterion in mate choice. Daily visit rates were positive..., , , # Variance partitioning of nest provisioning rates in blue tits: individual repeatability, heritability and partner interactions

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh5h](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh5h)

## Description of the data and file structure

* data_visits.csv (contains daily number of nest visits ):
* year - year of study
* box - unique nestbox identifier
* ID - unique individual identifier
* nest - unique breeding attempt identifier
* sex - sex of individual (1 = male, 2 = female)
* age - age category (1 = yearling, 2 = adult)
* partner - identity of breeding partner
* date\_ - unique identifier for each date of the study (yyyy_yday)
* hatchDate - day of first hatch (1 = January 1st)
* yday - day of year (1 = January 1st)
* chickAge - age of chicks in days (1 = hatch day)
* broodsizeday14 - brood size when chicks were 14 days of age
* visits - number of visits made
* data_pedigree.csv (contains relatedness between individuals):
* id - ...