At night the two nestle in a sleeping loft with three feet of clearance, gazing at stars through a skylight.
Ahead of the IOC's decision, Andrey Kryukov, who leads Kazakhstan's bid, waxed lyrical about Almaty – an urban centre of 1.6 million nestling in the foothills of the majestic Tian Shan range – as "a real winter-sports city surrounded by 4,000-metre 4,000-metreins withighenty of real snow".
Incubation takes 30 36 days; hatching success for undisturbed pairs can be as high as 95 percent but, because of sibling competition or siblicide, in the wild usually all but one nestling dies within the first few weeks (later in the pink-backed and spot-billed species).
A brood was defined as infected by APV when at least one nestling was positive for APV.
To avoid repeat sampling of females, we randomly selected one incubation video and one nestling stage video per female for the analysis.
One nestling did not show a measurable response (possibly because of a failed injection) and was not included in the analysis.
We then used linear mixed effects models to investigate any sex difference in response to playback at the three nestling phases.
All statistical analyses were carried out using JMP 7.0.1 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, U.S.A .. Pseudo-replication was avoided by analyzing data obtained from only one nestling per female, which was chosen at random.
At all three nestling stages, partners of focal birds significantly increased their provisioning rates (paired t-tests: early-stage, t56 = 3.3, p = 0.001; mid-stage, t45 = 2.4, p = 0.017; late-stage, t26 = 4.0, p<0.001; Figure 3).
Blowfly prevalence and APV presence in blood were tightly associated in both years, with all nests infested by blowflies containing at least one nestling infected by APV while only one brood out of 89 had a single nestling positive for APV in uninfested nests (Fisher's exact test, P<0.0001).
