Fig 1.
Representative clutch images of the Common Moorhen (left) and the King Rail (right) demonstrating the variation in patterning and color within and between clutches.
Fig 2.
Process and decision tree for identifying cases of renesting females, likely conspecific brood parasites and renests in King Rails by combining NaturePatternMatch output with spatial and temporal data.
Table 1.
PERMANOVA output for King Rails and Common Moorhens.
Fig 3.
Three Common Moorhen clutches laid by the same hen in two separate years.
The clutch in the first row was laid in 1992 and the lower two rows are clutches laid in 1993. Colored outlines indicate eggs that matched best with another egg in the same clutch. Arrows indicate NPM matches between clutches. Though a high degree of within-clutch matches suggests a possible confound of photographic differences, matches of eggs with shared maternity both within season and between years occurred in spite of these photographic differences.
Fig 4.
Linear discriminant analysis of King Rail clutches.
In each plot, a single clutch of eggs is highlighted (red symbols within ellipse) in relation to other clutches (grey ellipses). Graphs A and B are examples of clutches with closely grouped eggs. Graphs C and D show clutches with greater variance.
Fig 5.
Aerial photo of (A) South and (B) North sides of Mackay Island NWR with mapped King Rail nests color-coded by year. According to Tier I criteria, (A) Nests 19–22 and 20–05 and (B) Nests 17–22 and 16–17 each likely represent an instance of a returning female breeder. Whereas Nests 20–20 and 20–21 represent a probable case of conspecific brood parasitism. Double headed arrows among eggs indicate symmetrical pattern matching. Single headed arrows among eggs indicate non-symmetrical pattern matching from query egg to selected match. Imagery data used to create maps available from open access platform NOAA Data Access Viewer (https://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/#/).
Table 2.
Putative cases of conspecific brood parasitism, renests and return breeders identified using NPM match data.
Fig 6.
Spatial relationships among King Rail nests with matching eggs identified by NPM.
Maps of the (A) South and (B) North sides of Mackay Island NWR show King Rail nests color-coded by year. Mapped nest pairs with matching eggs are labeled in adjacent boxes along with the physical distance between them. (C) Corresponding images with matching King Rail eggs from different clutches indicated by arrows based on Tier II criteria. Arrows indicate the direction of non-symmetrical matching from query egg to its NPM-assigned best match. Imagery data used to create maps available from open access platform NOAA Data Access Viewer (https://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/#/).