DOI: 10.5061/dryad.d0cp4
title: Data from: Shifts in hatch dates do not provide pied flycatchers with a rapid ontogenetic route to adjust offspring time schedules to climate change

description: 1. Environments change rapidly, and it is unclear whether organisms with
 complex life-styles, such as avian migrants, are able to adjust
 sufficiently. For understanding human impacts on ecosystem functioning, it
 is crucial to understand how well, and by which mechanisms species are
 able to adapt. 2. To improve the understanding of migrants’ ability to
 adjust their annual timing to climate change, we investigated ontogenetic
 hatch date effects on adult spring migration timing and female egg laying
 dates. We experimentally delayed hatch dates of pied flycatchers Ficedula
 hypoleuca by one week in three breeding seasons by delaying incubation
 onset. We investigate if natural and experimental (shifts in) hatch date
 affected timing of recruiting individuals up to at least three years after
 the manipulation. 3. Spring arrival dates were positively correlated to
 natural variation in hatch dates in three of the five years considered,
 but no such effects were found in egg laying. Experiments showed that
 delayed hatching resulted in delayed arrival and laying only in one-year
 old and not in older birds. These effects were mostly observed during one
 of the study years. 4. The discrepancy between experimental and natural
 hatch date effects indicate that a causal hatch date effect is not
 generally responsible for the correlation between hatch date and timing
 during adulthood. Instead, we propose that natural hatch date effects on
 spring arrival arise from genetic variation in migration schedules, while
 delays in hatching induced carry-over effects on arrival and laying dates
 in offspring (e.g. the experimental effect in 2010). Strong support for
 year-specific expression of hatch date and delay effects on time schedules
 imply that trait-variation can be easily obscured. The latter may explain
 the lack of hatch date effects on female egg laying. 5. Our results imply
 that plasticity in breeding phenology does not provide pied flycatchers
 with a non-genetic inheritance route to rapidly advance annual cycles.
 Instead, plasticity may rather masks (genetic) trait-variation for
 selection to act on, and thereby slow down micro-evolutionary adaptation
 to changing environments.
description: timing1_descriptiveA descriptive dataset with field data used to study timing of arrival and laying of pied flycatchers, Ficedula hypoleuca, in relation to their date of hatching (at birth), as studied in a breeding population in Drenthe (The Netherlands). This includes chicks born in 2007-2013 that did not perceive experimental delay treatments, and that arrived and/or laid their eggs at least once in 2010-2014.timing2_experimentalAn experimental dataset with field data used to study timing of arrival and laying of pied flycatchers, Ficedula hypoleuca, in relation to their date of hatching (at birth), as studied in a breeding population in Drenthe (The Netherlands). This includes chicks born in 2009-2011 that were part of a delayed hatching experiment (i.e. a control or delay treatment), and that arrived and/or laid their eggs at least once in 2010-2014.survival_experimentalA dataset with pied flycatcher chicks born in 2009-2011 within the delayed hatching experiment (as control or delay) in relation to their treatment, body weight and 'survival'.README