The Socioecology of Parental Investment Strategies in Ants.

蚂蚁父母投资策略的社会生态学。

• 批准号: 0642085
• 负责人: Peter Nonacs
• 金额: $ 29.81万
• 依托单位: University of California-Los Angeles
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-05-01 至 2011-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0642085&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Socioecology; Parental; Investment; Strategies; Ants.

A fundamental decision for parents is how much to invest in offspring. Potentially this involves a tradeoff where more investment in each one reduces the total number of young.. The current dogma for parental care assumes this tradeoff is always present because food is always limiting. If true, parents should strive for a single "optimal" size young and should invest the same amount into every offspring. Further, if food availability changes, parents should change numbers of offspring rather than their size. If parents are not always food limited, however, then parents can match investment to the immediate environment (resulting in offspring of varying size and quality). Although these are very different ways of rearing young, they are not easy to differentiate. Tests require species where: (1) Consequences of offspring size are measurable; and (2) Many young are produced at one time so that offspring size distributions can be quantified and compared. Ants are ideal for testing parental investment strategies. Offspring size strongly affects founding success of new colonies, and mature colonies produce hundreds of young at a time. The goals of our research are to: (1) Quantify the costs and benefits of offspring size in harvester ants, and (2) Experimentally manipulate food for their colonies in the field. Together, the experiments test how ecology affects parental behavior. If parental strategies do track the environment, a major paradigm shift in understanding parent-offspring conflict, offspring sex ratios, and reproduction in social groups will follow. This project will train one graduate student and several undergraduates in field biology, data collection and experimental design. Students from historically underrepresented groups will be recruited through programs (CARE and MARC) supported by UCLA, NSF and NIH. One high school teacher, Ms. Rosa Chan, will be included in all aspects of the project through the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program. She will be trained to develop inquiry-based lessons for classroom use (which will also be made available online through UCLA's GK-12 program).

父母的一个根本决定是在子女身上投资多少。潜在地，这涉及到一种权衡，在每一种情况下，更多的投资会减少幼崽的总数。目前关于父母照料的教条假设这种权衡总是存在的，因为食物总是有限的。如果这是真的，父母应该努力在幼年时找到一个最理想的体型，并且应该对每个后代投入相同的金额。此外，如果食物供应发生变化，父母应该改变后代的数量，而不是他们的大小。然而，如果父母并不总是食物有限，那么父母可以将投资与附近的环境相匹配(导致后代的大小和质量各不相同)。虽然这是非常不同的育儿方式，但它们并不容易区分。测试要求满足以下条件的物种：(1)后代大小的后果是可测量的；(2)一次产生许多幼崽，以便能够量化和比较后代大小分布。蚂蚁是测试父母投资策略的理想选择。后代的大小对新群体的建立成功有很大的影响，成熟的群体一次能产下数百只幼崽。我们的研究目标是：(1)量化收割机蚂蚁后代大小的成本和收益，(2)在田间实验中为它们的蚁群操纵食物。总之，这些实验测试了生态环境如何影响父母的行为。如果父母的策略确实跟踪了环境，那么在理解亲子冲突、子女性别比例和社会群体生殖方面的重大范式转变将随之而来。该项目将对一名研究生和几名本科生进行野外生物学、数据收集和实验设计方面的培训。来自历史上代表性不足的群体的学生将通过加州大学洛杉矶分校、国家科学基金会和美国国立卫生研究院支持的项目(CARE和MARC)进行招生。一名高中教师Rosa Chan女士将通过教师研究经验(RET)计划被纳入该项目的所有方面。她将接受培训，开发课堂上使用的探究式课程(也将通过加州大学洛杉矶分校的GK-12项目在线提供)。