This thesis examines whether juvenile feral pigeons, Columba livia, form sibling alliances when competing for access to a defensible food source. When tested as a flock at a non-depletable column feeder, with room for either one or two birds to feed, siblings associated with each other more often than expected by chance. Frequency of aggression between siblings at these feeders tended to be lower than expected on the basis of their association. Removal experiments showed that sibling presence had a positive effect on relative feeding success at the single column feeder: a juvenile who lost to another juvenile on a one-to-one basis tended, in the presence of its sibling, to lose less badly to, or even beat, that same juvenile. In contrast, presence of the winner's sibling tended not to affect the relative feeding success of competitors. These results support the hypothesis that pigeon siblings form aggressive alliances when competing for food that is defensible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.23878 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Cole, Heather J. |
| Contributors | Lefebvre, Louis (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Biology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001487448, proquestno: MM12175, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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