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 strateg...