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. 2020 May 7:17:13.
doi: 10.1186/s12983-020-00360-2. eCollection 2020.

A protective nesting association with native species counteracts biotic resistance for the spread of an invasive parakeet from urban into rural habitats

Dailos Hernández-Brito  1 , Guillermo Blanco  2 , José L Tella  1 , Martina Carrete  3
Affiliations

A protective nesting association with native species counteracts biotic resistance for the spread of an invasive parakeet from urban into rural habitats

Dailos Hernández-Brito et al. Front Zool. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Background: Non-native species are often introduced in cities, where they take advantage of microclimatic conditions, resources provided by humans, and competitor/predator release to establish and proliferate. However, native communities in the surrounding rural or natural areas usually halt their spread through biotic resistance, mainly via top-down regulative processes (predation pressure). Here, we show an unusual commensal interaction between exotic and native bird species that favours the spread of the former from urban to rural habitats.

Results: We show how Monk parakeets Myiopsitta monachus, an invasive species often introduced in cities worldwide, associated for breeding with a much larger, native species (the white stork Ciconia ciconia) to reduce predation risk in central Spain, thus allowing their colonization of rural areas. Parakeets selected stork nests close to conspecifics and where breeding raptors were less abundant. Parakeets always flushed when raptors approached their nests when breeding alone, but stayed at their nests when breeding in association with storks. Moreover, when storks abandoned a nest, parakeets abandoned it in the following year, suggesting that storks actually confer protection against predators.

Conclusions: Our results show how a protective-nesting association between invasive and native species can counteract biotic resistance to allow the spread of an invasive species across non-urban habitats, where they may become crop pests. Monk parakeet populations are now growing exponentially in several cities in several Mediterranean countries, where they coexist with white storks. Therefore, management plans should consider this risk of spread into rural areas and favour native predators as potential biological controllers.

Keywords: Biological invasions; Biotic resistance; Commensalism; Facilitation; Monk parakeet; Predation pressure; White stork.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Parakeets and storks. Nests of monk parakeets (yellow arrows) associated with white stork nests. (Photos: D. Hernández-Brito)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Study area. Urban (dark grey) and surrounding rural (white) areas of Madrid Metropolitan area (40° 21′ 03.1“ N, 3° 30’ 06.1” W). Different coloured points show the location of nests of raptors (red), storks (yellow), and parakeets associated (blue) or not associated (purple) with storks. Black dashed lines are rivers
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Probability of parakeet-stork association in rural habitats. Parakeets select rural stork nests located farther from predators (aggregation of predators) and surrounded by larger densities of conspecifics (aggregation of parakeets). Estimates (solid lines), confidence intervals (dashed lines) and raw data (black dots) are shown for 2014 and 2015
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Antipredatory response of monk parakeets. Frequency of observations (mean and 95% CI) in which nesting monk parakeets flushed when approached by a predator (raptor) in urban and rural habitats. For rural individuals, the frequency of birds flushing is separately shown for nests associated or not associated with storks
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