[CS] TODAY at 3:30: Andy Zink, "Cooperation and conflict over parental care in communally breeding animals"

[Paula Harmon]

Andy Zink, Candidate for Assistant Professor of Evolution & Cognition

"Cooperation and conflict over parental care in communally breeding animals"

TUESDAY, FEB. 21, 3:30 p.m. in ASH 111
Cooperation, through coordinated effort and action, is a common 
feature of the natural world. Genes cooperate to form a genome, cells 
cooperate to form organisms, and individuals cooperate to form 
societies. But at each level of organization we also see conflict 
among biological units that compete for resources crucial to their 
own replication. Elucidating the evolutionary forces that maintain 
cooperation, despite these conflicts, is a major challenge for 
biologists. In this talk I will address evolutionary conflicts in 
communally breeding animals, with a specific focus on the allocation 
of parental care. I will begin with a broad overview of my 
theoretical work, which synthesizes separate bodies of theory on 
cooperative breeding and reproductive parasitism. Together, these 
models provide a general framework for predicting the degree of 
conflict over offspring care in animal societies. For the remainder 
of the talk I will describe two separate field studies that address 
conflicts over parental care in communally breeding insects. In both 
of these systems (lace bugs and treehoppers) adult females exhibit 
parental care by guarding their egg clusters until they hatch. 
Secondary females visit and lay eggs into these preexisting egg 
clusters in order to avoid the costs of parental care (a form of 
brood parasitism). I describe a field study with lace bugs in which I 
examined the adaptive significance of this brood parasitic behavior, 
focusing specifically on conflict between host and parasite over the 
number of eggs that a parasite adds to a host's egg cluster. I then 
describe a field study in treehoppers in which I quantified the 
lifetime benefits of the brood parasitic behavior, for both the host 
and parasite, while investigating how natural selection maintains 
brood parasitism in treehopper populations.

Andy Zink received a B.A. from Bowdoin College in 1994, where he 
majored in both Biology and Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from 
the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell 
University in 2002, where he was awarded the Cole Award for his 
dissertation work. Andy's interests encompass broad connections 
between the evolution, ecology and behavior of animals. More 
specifically, his research focuses on the evolution of cooperation 
among individuals in animal societies. His field work has examined 
parental care in communally breeding insects commonly found on local 
wildflowers (such as goldenrod). His theoretical work has used 
analytical models to predict the resolution of evolutionary conflict 
over reproduction and parental care in animal societies. Andy is 
currently a USDA postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, 
Davis where he is conducting additional research on insect behavior 
and selective offspring abortion in plants.


-- 
Paula Harmon, Coordinator
Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program in 
Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)
Adele Simmons Hall, Room 100
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002
phone: 413-559-5501; fax: 413-559-5438
email: cbd at hampshire.edu
http://cbd.hampshire.edu
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