DOI: 10.5061/dryad.46mm022
title: Data from: Achromatic plumage brightness predicts stress resilience and social interactions in tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor)

description: Theory suggests that signal honesty may be maintained by differential
 costs for high and low quality individuals. For signals that mediate
 social interactions, costs can arise from the way that a signal changes
 the subsequent social environment via receiver responses. These
 receiver-dependent costs may be linked with individual quality through
 variation in resilience to environmental and social stress. Here, we
 imposed stressful conditions on female tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor)
 by attaching groups of feathers during incubation to decrease flight
 efficiency and maneuverability. We simultaneously monitored social
 interactions using an RFID network that allowed us to track the identity
 of every individual that visited each nest for the entire season. Prior to
 treatments, plumage coloration was correlated with baseline and
 stress-induced corticosterone. Relative to controls, experimentally
 challenged females were more likely to abandon their nest during
 incubation. Overall, females with brighter white breasts were less likely
 to abandon, but this pattern was only significant under stressful
 conditions. In addition to being more resilient, brighter females received
 more unique visitors at their nest box and tended to make more visits to
 other active nests. In contrast, dorsal coloration did not reliably
 predict abandonment or social interactions. Taken together, our results
 suggest that females differ in their resilience to stress and that these
 differences are signaled by plumage brightness, which is in turn
 correlated with the frequency of social interactions. While we do not
 document direct costs of social interaction, our results are consistent
 with models of signal honesty based on receiver-dependent costs.
description: Input_Main_DataData file that includes one row per individual female bird included in the paper.Input_Avg_Daily_VisitsData file that includes the average number of different visit metrics across all days recorded for each nest box in the study. The 'unitbox' column joins to the main data file.Input_Male_Detect_DatesData file that includes first and last detection dates for males in the study based on RFID records.Input_ties_by_rowData file that includes one row for each unique visit identified to a different box in the study with information about each visit.Input_Visits_By_DayData file with each row being one day of observation per nest box with information about social activity for each day.Input_AllVisitsMergedFull raw RFID records that includes both visits to other nests and trips to focal birds own nests throughout the breeding season. Used to identify and tabulate the visit pattern data.Code_Make_DailyRFIDR script that processes the raw RFID files to make the visit data that is used in the main analyses. This sub-script is called from the main analysis script: 'Code_Color_Abandon.r'Code_Color_AbandonThis is the main code used to produce all the analyses and figures presented in the paper and in the supplement. It should be run from a directory containing all of the 'input' data files.