Optimal parental investment – a battle between the sexes.

Families in which two parents raise their offspring are currently no longer seen as a harmonious unit. They rather represent a battleground shaped by evolutionary conflicts of interest among its members that are not perfectly related. This is particularly true for parents. Although parents temporarily cooperate to enhance offspring survival, each parent can gain extra benefits by transferring the largest workload to the partner. Parents thus need to negotiate about their investment to reach optimal cooperation. However, it is currently unclear how such negotiation can contribute to evolutionary stable levels of care. This is largely due to a lack of empirical knowledge about (1) how the negotiation process develops throughout a reproductive event, (2) sex differences in the costs and benefits of negotiation and (3) potential physiological constraints on cooperation. The aim of this proposal is to fill and bridge these knowledge gaps via carefully designed experimental manipulations of parental exploitation opportunities, sexual conflict intensity and family structures. Meanwhile, I will include a proximate view to examine the extent to which hormone profiles constrain negotiated levels of care. Taken together, this proposed research will significantly increase our knowledge about the mechanisms that lead to conflict resolution and set the stage for the next generation of theoretical negotiation models explaining evolutionary stability of biparental care.

Keywords:BEHAVIOURAL ECOLOGY

Disciplines:Animal biology