ArticleOecologia2020
Bitter fruits of hard labour: diet metabarcoding and telemetry reveal that urban songbirds travel further for lower-quality food.
Article in Oecologia, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A global meta-analysis reveals higher variation in breeding phenology in urban birds than in their non-urban neighbours.Ecology letters · 2022Pooled it
- An Analysis of Great Tit Egg Traits Across the City Mosaic: Urbanisation Does Not Affect Egg Size and Pigmentation Patterns.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Phenological plasticity enables thermal homeostasis in a wild bird population.Science advances · 2026Article
- Context-Dependent Effects of Amino Acid Supplementation on Nestling Growth and Baseline Innate Immune Function.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Forest Degradation and Weather Jointly Affect Early-Life Development in a Tropical Understory Bird.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Native trees are related to advanced bird breeding phenology and increased reproductive success along an urban gradient.Ecology · 2026Article
- Dietary DNA Metabarcoding From Animal Fecal Samples.Current protocols · 2026Article
- Selection and Adaptation to Urban Food Resources Promote Spotted Dove (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Site-Specific Impacts of Urbanisation on Annual Survival of a Forest Bird.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Urban effects on timing and variability of diel activity differ across passerine species and seasons.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Environmental constraints can explain clutch size differences between urban and forest blue tits: Insights from an egg removal experiment.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Radio-tracking urban breeding birds: The importance of native vegetation.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Urban biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Differences in phenology across three trophic levels between two Afrotropical sites separated by four degrees latitude.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Dietary fatty acids modulate oxidative stress response to air pollution but not to infection.Frontiers in physiology · 2024Article
- Urban tree composition is associated with breeding success of a passerine bird, but effects vary within and between years.Oecologia · 2023Article
- DNA metabarcoding identifies urban foraging patterns of oligolectic and polylectic cavity-nesting bees.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Double-brooding and annual breeding success of great tits in urban and forest habitats.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Changes to the gut microbiota of a wild juvenile passerine in a multidimensional urban mosaic.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Rapidly increasing urbanisation requires mitigation against associated losses of biodiversity and species abundance. In urban-breeding birds, altered food availability for nestlings is thought to reduce reproductive success compared to forest populations. To compensate for shortages of preferred foods, urban parents could increase their search effort for optimal diets or provision other foods. Here, we used telemetry and faecal metabarcoding on blue tits from one urban and one forest populations to compare parental effort and comprehensively describe nestling diet. Urban parents travelled on average 30% further than those in the forest, likely to offset limited availability of high-quality nestling food (i.e. caterpillars) in cities. Metabarcoding, based on a mean number of 30 identified taxa per faeces, revealed that the diets of urban chicks were nonetheless substantially shifted to include alternative foods. While in the forest caterpillars comprised 82 ± 11% of taxa provisioned to nestlings, in the city they constituted just 44 ± 10%. Pre-fledging chick mass as well as offspring numbers were lower in urban than in forest-reared broods. Thus, at least in our comparison of two sites, the hard labour of urban parents did not fully pay off, suggesting that improved habitat management is required to support urban-breeding birds.
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