Social and co-evolutionary dynamics of mating behaviour and parental care

交配和父母的投资是决定生物体生活史的关键因素。最近的一项实证研究调查表明，尽管有很长的兴趣和调查历史，但对交配行为和父母投资模式之间预测关系的支持很少。例如，如果未来有机会获得更高的亲子地位，男性预计会减少父母的努力，以应对父子关系的下降，而女性则会根据表明健康的男性特征来选择男性。然而，这两个预测都没有确凿的经验支持。因此，当前概念框架的解释能力依赖于事后解释，而不是能够产生先验预测。可能的原因是，交配和父母照顾之间的关系中重要的组成部分，如两性之间关于提供照顾的数量和亲子行为的冲突，已经被独立研究，而没有考虑它们的相互作用(即没有考虑社会和共同进化的反馈循环)。为了能够预测交配行为和父母投资模式的演变(从而预测交配系统和生物体的生活史)，需要了解每个家庭成员的行为如何受到家庭其他成员的行为的影响。在这里，我们建议使用人工选择来测试雌性交配行为如何与雄性照顾共同进化，如何与母性照顾权衡，并影响亲子关系。特别是，我们将研究这些反馈环如何影响或与性别之间现有的遗传相关性相互作用。这种共同进化的方法对于更完整地理解生命史进化背后的动力是必不可少的。我们将在埋葬甲虫中进行这项研究，在那里我们对遗传模式、社会互动和行为有相当大的初步和背景研究。因此，我们的总体目标是通过实验测试雌性天牛反复交配行为的进化如何影响涉及父母照料和交配行为的特征的(共同)进化。我们拟议的工作考察了个体之间的社会互动在确定交配和父母照料行为之间的共同进化关系中的重要性，从这种关系中，交配系统和相关的生物体生活史特征作为紧急属性出现。因此，我们的工作将形成一块重要的垫脚石，用于开发一种新的范式，根据家庭成员之间的行为互动来理解交配系统的进化和生物体的生活史特征。

Mating and parental investment are key factors in determining the life history of an organism. A recent survey of empirical research suggests that despite a long history of interest and investigation, support for predicted relationships between mating behaviour and patterns of parental investment is poor. For example, males are predicted to decrease their parental effort in response to a decrease in their paternity if there are opportunities for higher paternity in the future, and females are expected to choose males based on male traits that indicate his fitness. However, neither of these predictions have firm empirical support. Consequently the explanatory power of the current conceptual framework relies upon post-hoc explanations rather than being able to generate a priori predictions. The likely reason for this is that the components of the relationship between mating and parental care that are important, such as conflict between the sexes over the amount of care to provide and parent-offspring behaviours, have been studied independently without considering their interactions (i.e. without considering social and co-evolutionary feedback loops). To be able to predict the evolution of patterns of mating behaviour and parental investment (and therefore mating systems and the life-histories of organisms) requires an understanding of how the behaviour of each family member is affected by the behaviour of the other members of the family. Here we propose to use artificial selection to test how female mating behaviour co-evolves with male care, trades-off with maternal care and influences parent-offspring relationships. In particular we will examine how these feedback loops affect or interact with the existing genetic correlations between the sexes. Such a co-evolutionary approach is essential to gain a more complete understanding of the dynamics underlying life-history evolution. We will pursue this research in the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, where we have considerable preliminary and background research on patterns of inheritance, social interactions, and behaviour. Consequently our overall objective is to test experimentally how evolution of repeated mating behaviour of female Nicrophorus vespilloides beetles affects the (co)evolution of traits involved in parental care and mating behaviour. Our proposed work examines the importance of social interactions among individuals in determining the co-evolutionary relationship between mating and parental care behaviours, from which mating systems and associated life-history traits of organisms arise as emergent properties. Our work will therefore form an important stepping stone towards the development of a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of mating systems and life-history traits of organisms based on behavioural interactions among family members.