Data and code from: Nest building as a missing piece in biparental care

Many birds practice biparental care, providing useful systems to study its
evolution. Although nest building has largely been ignored as biparental
behaviour, as nest building has to happen before incubation and
provisioning, it could enable parents to start evaluating their mate.
While there are ample data on biparental incubation and provisioning in
model species like zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), nest-building data
largely concerns material collection and preference in males. Here we
collected data on building by both female and male zebra finches to test
whether building behaviour depends on the behaviour of their mate or on
the material they used to build their nest. Males handled nest material
more frequently when their female was in the nest, while females handled
nest material longer when their male was away from the nest. But neither
females nor males altered their building behaviour in response to changes
in their partner handling nest material. Males that built with stiff
material handled the material more frequently than those that built with
flexible material, while females manipulated stiff and flexible materials
similarly. An important next step is to determine whether these building
interactions affect later stages of parental care in the wild or in other
species.

# Data and code from: Nest building as a missing piece in biparental care
This is a README file for data and R code associated with 'Nest
building as a missing piece in biparental care'.
'data_extraction_analysis.R' contains R code to extract
necessary information and data from CSV files and run the statistical
analysis described in the main text. 'pair_treatment.csv'
describes an experimental treatment to which each pair was assigned.
'trial_length.csv' contains the duration which each pair was
filmed in seconds. 'pairX.csv' contains behavioural data of
zebra finch pair X. As we collected data from 20 pairs, X ranges from 1 to
20 (i.e., there are 20 CSV files that contain behavioural data). These
files contain five columns, including: Time; Length; Sex; Behaviour; and
Status. Time is the elapsed time in seconds since the beginning of the
trial when the subject bird performed one of the scored behavioural
categories. Length is the duration of the scored section of the footage in
seconds. Note: Time can exceed Length as video footage was split into
multiple sections for data storage purposes. Sex is the sex of the subject
bird, while Behaviour is the category of the performed behaviour by the
subject bird. Status indicates whether the entry is when the behaviour was
performed (POINT), or the subject started (START) or stopped (STOP) the
behaviour when scoring the behavioural categories, of which we measured
the duration.