Effects Of Female Morphological Characteirsitcs On Reproductive Strategy Adjustment In The Great Tit (Parus Major)

Morphological characteristics is an apparent aspect of phenotype, which isprobably selected. The author conducted a study on the effects of femalemorphological characteristics on reproductive strategy adjustment in the great Tit(Parus major) inside artificial nest box during March to July in2010and2011at ZuoJia Natural Reserve, Jilin province to prove the correctness of the hypotheses related.Primary discussion for the significance of the function of the morphologicalcharacteristics was progressed.The results showed that the respective difference of wing length, tail length,body length and tarsus length which were from different individual was significant,indicating that the quality of different individual was possibly different. Although thelaying time of different individual was significantly different within both thefirst-brood and the second-brood, they were not related to the female body sizesignificantly, which did not support Downhower’ s energetic model expecting thesmaller will breed earlier within a species; the clutch size of different individual wassignificantly different within both the first-brood and the second-brood, but they werenot related to the female body size significantly, which was not supportive for theassumption of Ryder(1970) that the bigger may have more eggs; the offspring sexratio did not deviate from1:1apparently, however, the offspring sex ratio of differentindividual was significantly different within both the first-brood and the second-broodand the female body size was significantly and negatively related to the proportion ofsons（p=0.02, df=1），which objected to our expectation steming from maternalcondition hypothesis；The author predicted that female body size would probablyaffect the growth rate of nestlings through“maternal effect”，even though thenestling-growth-rate of different individual was significantly different within both thefirst-brood and the second-brood, female body size did not affect them significantly.The author regarded the low temperature and the big predation pressure withinbreeding season in both2010and2011as the two main factors affecting theexperiment results above. In addition, the ability of rearing nestlings of differentindividual may need to take into consideration when the relationship between femalebody size and clutch size was analysed. The results indicated that female ornaments (breast stripe width) had nosignificant relationship with the laying time and the nestling-growth-rate of both thefirst brood and the second brood and had had no significant relationship with the firstbrood clutch size; the remarkable correlationships between ornaments and the secondbrood clutch size (r=0.698，p=0.00) and the significant regression relationshipbetween the ornaments and the proportion of sons (p=0.02, df=1) were found, whichwere supportive for the viewpoint that female ornament evolved independently.