Traços de história de vida e o efeito do querido inimigo em João-de-barro (Furnariidae: Furnarius rufus)

Abstract

The dear enemy and nasty neighbor are opposites effects and underlying to the neighbor-stranger discrimination, both being responsible for reducing the owners’ territorial costs and thus far little investigated in species with innate song such as the Suboscines. While the territory includes the resources monopolized by the owners, the home-range often contains shared resources. Besidesvarying temporally in size due to abiotic and biotic factors, the way these areas are used may affect the individuals dispersal patterns. Such dispersal refers to the between-landscape movements made by youngs at the sexual maturity onset and by adults at the onset of the breeding season. In this study we developed a new protocol for trapping territorial bird in urban areas using mist nest and playback which allowed us to experimentally investigate the neighborstranger discrimination ability in the Rufous hornero (Furnariidae: Furnarius rufus), a Suboscine species that have high site fidelity and in which both sexes cooperativelly defend their territory against neighbors and strangers. In adittion, we estimated the home-range and territory of couples in urban and rural areas during the breeding and non-breeding seasons, describing the lasting of mate bonds, the delayed dispersal events by juveniles and divorces in adults. Our results showed that Rufous hornero couples were more tolerant to simulated territorial interactions with neighbor duets, with no between-sexes difference on the aggressive response. Beyond that, the owners agressiveness against neighbors, and in contrast to strangers, was independent of the reproductive phenology, although it was more intense towards both competitors in the breeding season and against simulated territorial intrusions. The density of neighbors had litte effect on the owners’s agressiveness, but we observed agressiveness increase when the we simulated the interaction closer to the owner and in scenarios with the larger distances to the neighboring territories . We also observed that an urban and a 15 rural population of specie showed the largest home-range during the breeding season, specialy in the urban environment. The monitored territories remained stable throughout the year in one of the urban populations and were larger in the non-reproductive period in another urban population, with their size varying between urban populations throughout the reproductive phenology. Three delay dispersal events were observed during the breeding season and 26 divorces during the studied seasons. The odds for divorce were similar for both sexes, but females were more replaced during the breeding and males during the non-breeding season. Overal, our results suggest that the Rufous hornero is able to discriminate duets based on familiarity level with the emitters, being strangermore threatening than neighbor couples year-round. Moreover, the results evidence that a rural and an urban popularion of this species uses the habitat in different ways, a likely consequence of local variation in resources supply. The natal dispersal in urban areas was smaller than the values known in the literature. Futhermore, the observed differences in females and males divorces suggest distinct sexual strategies. Although limited to few populations living far appart, this dissertation fills important gaps about the natural history of Rufous hornero whichopen avenues for unfolding future studies.