Aggression, Mate-Guarding, Male Parental Care and Kinship

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This research project will test four hypotheses about evolutionary forces that affect the behavior of pair-bonded birds to each other and to the nestlings they raise: 1. Male-male aggression during a female's fertile period decreases the likelihood that the female's young are sired by males other than her territorial partner. 2. Female-female aggression during the egg-laying period functions to decrease the likelihood that females' broods contain nestlings from other females of the same species that lay their eggs in the nests of neighbors. 3. Mate- guarding by males is a response to females' behavior or ecological circumstances that increase the likelihood that females mate with more than one male. 4. Parental feeding of nestlings by males varies according to males' likelihood of genetic paternity as indicated by the behavior of females when they are fertile. These are important questions for several reasons. Dr. Gowaty and her colleagues are attempting to observe evolutionary processes as they occur, by testing the current functional utility and evolutionary significance of important, sometimes dramatic, social behaviors. Also, the researchers are testing hypotheses about the relationship of "confidence of paternity" (the perceived likelihood that a male is the actual genetic sire of the offspring he cares for) to actual genetic paternity as assessed using DNA markers. This in turn is important because ideas about confidence of paternity are theoretically prominent explanations for variation in the social behavior of male animals.