Presentation description

Grooming behavior is widespread among animals. Grooming takes time and energy away from other activities, such as foraging and reproduction; however, devoting too little time to grooming is also costly. The optimum amount of time an animal grooms may be influenced by body size. I used focal behavior sampling to measure the relative time budgets of 24 captive bird species, comprising 12 phylogenetically independent species pairs of varying body sizes.