Growing number of studies indicate that avian parents coordinate their parental care, and
this coordination is particularly important in species living in harsh environments, like
seabirds. The level and pattern of parental coordination in seabirds is largely unknown. Thus,
in this project parental coordination will be examined in the little auk – a small Arctic seabird.
Previous findings have indicated that little auk parents do coordinate chick provisioning, and
a great inter-pair variation is observed in the level of coordination (Wojczulanis-Jakubas et al
2018). The internship is to explore one of possible drivers of this variation, namely
behavioural similarity of the breeding partners in response to a novel objects. It has been
already shown in correlational study that little auk partners mate assortatively in respect to
some morphological and behavioural traits (Wojczulanis-Jakubas et al. 2018) and here the
question will be examined with an experimental approach. The material on the parents
behaviour (coordination and stress response) has been already collected in the field, and is
available in the form of video recordings. This material is to be processed during the
internship. Data collected based on the material will be then processed in R software, and
relevant analyses will be performed.
