Abstract
Begging behaviour can provide information on offspring hunger levels and be used by parents to adjustfood provisioning efforts. In cooperative breeders, helpers also provide care by feeding the young.However, how helpers of different sex and relatedness to the offspring respond to begging behaviour hasrarely been studied in cooperatively breeding species, which limits our understanding of the indirectand/or direct benefits that helpers may obtain by responding to offspring demand. Here, we used acooperatively breeding bird, the sociable weaver, Philetairus socius, to investigate how nest intervisitintervals of breeders and different types of helpers, distinguished by sex and relatedness, varied withacoustic begging. Moreover, we tested whether these different classes of provisioners experienceddistinct levels of begging. Our results show that only breeding males, but not breeding females or helpersof any sex and relatedness to the nestlings, returned faster to the nest to feed after experiencing morebegging calls. When contrasted directly, we confirmed a statistically supported difference in responses tobegging between male and female breeders. Surprisingly, second-order relatives experienced morebegging calls than the other classes of more related helpers and breeders. These results show that wemight find differences in how provisioners respond to begging levels when classifying group membersaccording to their potential fitness gains. In sociable weavers, the benefits and costs of adjusting feedingefforts to begging seem to differ with sex and life history stage. Experimental and more detailed in-vestigations on beggingefeeding interactions are necessary to understand the origin and prevalence of these differences across cooperatively breeding systems