Dissertation Research: Testing Alternative Hypotheses Concerning Why Parental Care Improves With Age

在许多动物中，随着年龄的增长，父母会生出更多更好的后代。对于这种改善，人们提出了两种不同的解释。首先，随着父母接近生命的尽头，子女变得越来越有价值。因此，年长的父母在子女身上花费更多的精力。第二种解释是，年老的动物随着年龄的增长积累了经验和技能，使它们能够更有效地利用时间和精力。因此，在同样的努力下，年长的个体能够比年轻的个体产生更多的后代。这项研究将在麻雀种群中探索这两种机制，麻雀是后院和农场中常见的鸟类。研究人员将观察年长的和年轻的双亲鸟，比较它们回巢喂养幼鸟的频率，以及它们为雏鸟寻找食物的时间。父母的能力将通过改变父母必须喂养的雏鸟的数量来测试，并通过测量不同年龄的学习能力来测试。这项研究有助于我们理解生殖随年龄的变化，并探讨这些变化的潜在行为原因。这将提高我们对父母行为生态学的理解，以及行为的生活模式如何影响生殖。

In many animals, parents produce more and better offspring as they get older. Two different explanations have been suggested for this improvement. The first is that as parents near the end of their lives, offspring become increasingly valuable. Older parents therefore expend more effort on those offspring. The second explanation is that older animals have accumulated experience and skills with age that allow them to be more efficient with their time and energy. Thus older individuals would be able to produce more offspring than younger individuals for the same effort. This research will explore these two mechanisms in a population of house sparrows, common birds found in backyards and on farms. Older and younger parent birds will be observed to compare how often they return to the nest to feed young and how long they search for food for their chicks. Parental ability will be tested by changing the number of young the parent birds have to feed, and by measuring learning ability at various ages.This research contributes to our understanding of changes in reproduction with age and examines potential behavioral causes of these changes. This will improve our understanding of the ecology of parental behavior and how life patterns of behavior affect reproduction.