Parent-offspring conflict in canaries: individual plasticity, genetic basis and co-adaptation.

The evolution of parental care is central to our understanding of among other social systems and sexual selection, which are main areas of research in evolutionary biology. However, virtually nothing is known about its genetic architecture. Parental care includes complex parent-offspring interactions and its evolution therefore depends on the evolution of two traits, parental provisioning and offspring begging. Both behaviours should ultimately become genetically correlated, since changes in one trait exert a selective pressure on the evolutionof the other. To complicate matters, the evolution of parental care is also shaped by a conflict of interest over the degree of provided parental investment between parents and offspring. My proposed research project aims at studying the genetic basis and consequences of co-adaptation between parental provisioning and offspring begging. In a first step, I will separately look at the heritability and phenotypic plasticity of both, parental provisioning and offspring begging, which set the basis for any co-evolutionary process. Next, I will focus onthe co-variance of both traits using an intra-individual and an intra-family approach. Finally, I will study the functional consequences of co-adaptation for both parents and offspring, which will also improve our understanding of who is winning the parent-offspring conflict.

Keywords:BEHAVIOURAL ECOLOGY

Disciplines:Other chemical sciences, Animal biology