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--></style><title>Candidate Lecture Tuesday: Andy Zink,
"Cooperation and con</title></head><body>
<div>TUESDAY, FEB. 21, 3:30 p.m. in ASH 111</div>
<div><font color="#000000"><b>Andy Zink<br>
<i>Candidate for Assistant Professor of Evolution &
Cognition</i></b></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><i><b><br></b></i></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="+2"
color="#000000"><i>"Cooperation and conflict over parental care
in communally breeding animals"</i></font><br>
<font color="#000000"><i><b></b></i></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">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.<br>
<br>
<b>Andy Zink</b> 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.</font><br>
<font color="#000000"></font></div>
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<div>Paula Harmon, Coordinator<br>
Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program in
Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)<br>
Adele Simmons Hall, Room 100<br>
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002<br>
phone: 413-559-5501; fax: 413-559-5438<br>
email: cbd@hampshire.edu<br>
http://cbd.hampshire.edu</div>
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