Parental investment in a changing world - how intrinsic and extrinsic factors alter parental strategies.

Parental care increases offspring survival, but comes at a cost for the parents. Parents are therefore presented with a trade-off between increased investment in current offspring and resource allocation into self-maintenance and future reproductive success. Thus to optimise their reproductive decisions, parents have to take numerous factors into account that relate to their own intrinsic capacity as well as to aspects of their social and ecological environment. With my research I aim to increase our understanding of (1) how reproductive decisions are related to environmental variation in food availability and food accessibility. In particular, I want to study whether and how individual specialisation in resource use constraints parents to comply their offspring's need; (2) how individual decisions depend on the partner, and how efficient withinpair coordination and equality in reproductive investment is achieved to ultimately maximise reproductive success; (3) how intrinsic changes, such as occur in the context of senescence, influence reproductive strategies - via changes in foraging performance and residual reproductive value. To answer these questions, I will study a wild population of individually marked Lesser black-backed gulls, a long-lived migratory seabird species with a high level of inter-individual variation in resource use. I will make use of state-of-the-art GPS devices that allow detailed measurements of parental effort and parental decision rules.

Keywords:BEHAVIOURAL ECOLOGY

Disciplines:Animal biology

Project type:Collaboration project