Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 269, Issue 1503, Pages 1905-1909Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2106
Keywords
body mass; Philetairus socius; predation risk; stabilizing selection; survival
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The survival of small birds is often believed to increase with increasing body mass, despite some evidence that body mass is usually maintained below the physiological maximum and that there are costs associated with high body mass, such as increased energetic expenditure and predation risk. In this study, we used an eight-year dataset to investigate survival in relation to body mass in a wild population of sociable weavers (Philetairus socius), a savannah-dwelling passerine bird. We present evidence for strong stabilizing selection on body mass, verifying the prediction that body mass probably results from a trade-off between the risks of starvation at low mass and predation at high mass.
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