Adult Survival and Imperfect Assessment of Parentage: Effects on Male Parenting Decisions

Mauck,; Marschall,; Parker,

doi:10.2307/2463745

Cited by 45 publications

(76 citation statements)

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“…Westneat & Sherman 1993) have Grafen (1980) marginal value No Werren et al (1980) ESS sometimes Winkler (1987) static optimization sometimes Whittingham et al (1992) static optimization sometimes Xia (1992) ESS sometimes Westneat & Sherman (1993) static optimization sometimes Houston (1995) static optimization sometimes Kokko (1999) ESS sometimes Mauck et al (1999) dynamic programming sometimes (Sheldon et al 1997Sheldon & Ellegren 1998;B. C. Sheldon, unpublished data distinguished 'mating effort' from parental effort and 'somatic effort', where mating effort is effort expended trying to obtain more matings and somatic effort is effort expended on self-maintenance.…”

Section: Summary Of Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Relating paternity to paternal care

Sheldon

2002

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B

152

126

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Intuition suggests, to most people, that parents should be selected to care for their offspring in relation to how certain they are of being the parents of those offspring. Theoretical models of the relationship between parental investment and certainty of parentage predict the two to be related only when some other assumptions are made, few of which can be taken for granted. I briefly review the models and their assumptions, and discuss two kinds of difficulty facing an empiricist wishing to test the models. The first is the problem of unmeasured (and immeasurable) variables. The second is the problem that even the most extensive models do not capture the complexity that can be demonstrated in real systems. I illustrate some of these problems, and some qualitative tests of the models, with experimental work on a population of the collared flycatcher. My conclusion is that although there are some cases where the models have qualitative support, we are a long way from understanding whether paternal care is commonly adjusted in relation to certainty of paternity.

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Section: Summary Of Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All recent models predict that a relationship between certainty of paternity and paternal investment can occur, although its detectability may vary with life-history characteristics (e.g. Houston 1995; Mauck et al 1999 …”

Section: Summary Of Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating paternity to paternal care

Sheldon

2002

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B

152

126

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“…These include breeding density Yezerinac et al, 1999), breeding synchrony (Stutchbury & Morton, 1995;, genetic diversity (Petrie & Lipsitch, 1994;Griffith, 2000), dependence on paternal care (Birkhead & Møller, 1996;Gowaty, 1996;Mulder et al, 1994), and adult mortality (Mauck et al, 1999;Wink & Dyrcz, 1999). Each of these hypotheses is briefly explained below.…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar findings exist for some observational studies (Chuang-Dobbs et al, 2001;Suter et al, 2009;Perlut et al, 2012), but males in most observational studies provide care independently of paternity (Rytkӧnen et al, 2007;LaBarbera et al, 2012; reviewed by ). The latter is the expected outcome when clear signals of paternity are missing (Whittingham et al, 1992;Kokko, 1999), especially when individuals tend to be short-lived and loss of paternity in the future is as likely as the present (Whittingham et al, 1992;Mauck et al, 1999).…”

Section: Variation In Paternal Effortmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Paternity and paternal care are unrelated in most studies (Rytkӧnen et al, 2007;LaBarbera et al, 2012;reviewed by Whittingham & Dunn, 2001), and the simplest explanation may be that males simply cannot assess their share of paternity. If this is the case, then the best option for males of short-lived species may be to deliver care in the expectation that he has sired at least a portion of a brood (Whittingham et al, 1992;Mauck et al, 1999). In addition, paternal care may persist when loss of paternity is high if female preference for parental males, demonstrated by caring for young regardless of paternity, improves a male's prospects of siring young with his social mate in the future (Freeman-Gallant, 1996;Freeman-Gallant, 1997;Rowe & Weatherhead, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Behavioral Observation and Paternal Investment of Eastern Kingbirds at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

Chutter

2000

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Chapter 2 was split into three distinct questions: 1) are parental nesting behaviors repeatable, 2) is a one hour sample sufficient to capture variability in these behaviors, and 3) is the first hour of recording sufficient to capture variability in these behaviors. I found overwhelming evidence that the behaviors I measured were repeatable. This is important because lack of repeatability would call into question the use of single point samples of behavior to study animal behavior. I similarly found strong evidence that a one hour sample was sufficient to capture variability in parental behaviors. From this I was able to suggest that further sampling effort would be better ii spent increasing sample size rather than observation length. Results of my test of whether the first hour of recording captured accurately variability in parental behavior was less clear. While a positive correlation usually existed between behaviors recorded in the first hour and recordings made over a 2 to 3 hour observation period, most behaviors also tended to have significantly lower values in the first hour. I tested whether this was the result of a lingering observer effect or a natural effect of time of day and concluded that an observer effect was the more likely explanation.In recent decades behavioral ecologists have shown that a majority of songbirds that breed as socially monogamous pairs are rarely genetically monogamous. This creates a conundrum for males, and in chapter 3 I address a question of long-standing debate among behavioral ecologists studying the extra-pair mating systems of birds; does loss of paternity lead to reductions in a male's investment in his social mate's current brood. I used the standard male feeding rate as a measure of male investment as well as a far more nuanced measure derived from the first eigenvector of a principal component analysis of six paternal behaviors. These were both tested using Akaike's Information Criterion against a number of variables likely to affect parental behavior, including realized paternity. Ultimately, I found no evidence that kingbirds were able to affect paternal investment in response to lost paternity, and conclude that they likely had no means to assess realized paternity within the nest of their social mate. However, from the other parameters tested I found that males increased their investment as brood size increased and as the female spent more time attending, but not feeding, the iii nestlings. Also, male investment decreased as territory density increased and flight feather length increased. Theory surrounding the variability of extra-pair paternity in birds can be used to account for these results. In a denser population males are predicted to reduce paternal effort for one of two reasons; increased likelihood of paternity loss in his own nest and an increased investment in pursuing extra-pair copulations of his own. Longer flight feathers are a sign of greater age and quality in kingbirds, so males with this trait are expected to spend more time pursui...

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Life History Theory and Evolutionary Psychology

Kaplan¹,

Gangestad²

2015

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

319

351

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Life History and Evolutionary Psychology 2 Life History Theory and Evolutionary PsychologyThe evolution of life is the result of a process in which variant forms compete to harvest energy from the environment and convert it into replicates of those forms. Individuals "capture" energy from the environment (through foraging, hunting, or cultivating) and "allocate" it to reproduction and survival-enhancing activities. Selection favors individuals who efficiently capture energy and effectively allocate it to enhance fitness within their ecological niche.Energy does not come for free. Were individuals able to expend unlimited energy at no cost, in principle they could evolve to grow and develop so rapidly they could begin reproducing immediately after birth, massively produce offspring, and preserve themselves such that they never age. In biological reality, however, individuals must live within finite energy "budgets" (themselves earned through energy and time expenditures), never spending more than they have available. Allocation of a finite budget entails trade-offs and hence forces decisions about the relative value of possible ways to spend. Acquiring one expensive item means giving up others; consumption today may entails less tomorrow.In the face of trade-offs, how should a budget be spent? People managing their personal expenses presumably spend it based on what they value (even if sometimes only fleetingly and later regrettably). Moreover, their decisions are often based on individual circumstances that, over time, change: Wealthy individuals can afford to spend more on luxury items than can the middle-class or poor; college students often see little value to saving for retirement until, through education, they gain better employment; people with steady, good incomes can afford to keep less as a buffer against bad times than those whose future incomes are uncertain.Selection favors organisms' strategies for allocating energy budgets on the basis of one criterion: The strategy that leads to the allocation of energy that, on average, results in the greatest fitness is the one that wins out over others. In this sense, selection is expected to result in "fitness-maximizing" or "optimal" strategies. (Of course, those strategies are "optimal" only in a restricted sense: They are optimal under the constraints imposed by trade-offs between Life History and Evolutionary Psychology 3 allocations of energy; see Parker & Maynard Smith, 1991 1 ). Just as strategies of how to spend money depend on individual circumstances, so too do optimal energy allocations: Newborns optimally allocate energy differently from adults; healthy individuals optimally allocate differently from those with infectious disease; the best allocation strategy for individuals in stable circumstances differs from that of individuals whose future circumstances are unpredictable.Fundamentally, Life History Theory (LHT) provides a framework that addresses how, in the face of trade-offs, organisms should allocate time and energy to tasks and traits in a w...

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Adult Survival and Imperfect Assessment of Parentage: Effects on Male Parenting Decisions

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Relating paternity to paternal care

Relating paternity to paternal care

Behavioral Observation and Paternal Investment of Eastern Kingbirds at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

Life History Theory and Evolutionary Psychology

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