Social rank governs the effective environment of siblings

Siblings within the same family often differ dramatically in phenotype. Some differences are attributable to initial maternal handicaps (birth or hatching asynchrony, differences in egg or neonate size and hormonal or antioxidant titre); but differences among siblings may also arise from differences in the brood-rearing environment that offspring experience. Here, I use a model system--a long-term study of nestlings in an altricial bird--to study how an initial maternal handicap, hatching asynchrony, regulates the effective social environment of siblings in the same family as measured by offspring survival. The interaction of family size and structure generated wide differences in the effective environments of siblings living in the same physical space (a nest), and reared by the same parents, in the same family structure. Social rank was the key component of the unshared environment of contemporary siblings, and was alone sufficient to generate near-maximal differences in offspring performance. Nestlings sitting side-by-side effectively lived in different worlds.