My general research interests rely on understanding how variation in the costs of parental care can affect the co-evolution between male parental effort and reproductive decisions, both in males and females. During my Ph.D., I studied the costs and benefits of parental behavior and mate choice in harvestmen with male-only care, exploring different areas of evolutionary biology, such as behavioral ecology, the evolution of life-history traits, and sexual selection. In my two postdoctoral experiences, I incorporated a mathematical modeling approach into my research program, using evolutionary game theory models to explore the effects of offspring independence from care (and, consequently, the costs associated with this behavior) and sperm competition on male allocation to different components of fitness.
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Costs and benefits of parental care
Paternal care is expressed in a great variety of forms in nature and, consequently, the costs and benefits vary widely across species, especially in non-avian systems. Quantifying the importance of male parental behavior to offspring survival, development and overall quality, as well as its negative impact on the parent’s performance, is crucial to understand the fitness balance of this behavioral trait. I have focused my research on arachnids from the order Opiliones (a.k.a harvestmen or daddy long-legs), but have also collaborated with studies on frogs.
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Trade-offs between mating and caring
In species with male-only care, parental behaviors do not necessarily constrain males’ ability to seek additional mates and fertilize additional eggs. In several arthropods, fishes, and frogs, for example, parental males can care simultaneously for multiple broods composed by eggs from different females laid at different moments. Therefore, different from birds, males from these species incur in less strong trade-offs between mating and caring. However, such dynamic may prolong the total period males dedicate to the offspring, which ultimately may affect the costs associated to parental behavior. Taking this dynamic into account is important to better understand long-term costs of care, and I have been conducting empirical work on this topic using harvestmen species with male-only care.
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Direct benefits mediating mate choice
In the last decades, several studies have focused on the relevance of the indirect genetic benefits mechanisms for the evolution of sexually selected traits. In this sense, the direct benefits mechanism has received relatively little attention and its complexity has not yet been fully explored. My research program addresses this gap, investigating female mate preferences based on males’ parental status and the prospective quality of paternal behavior they can provide, both empirically (in harvestmen species) and theoretically.
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Interplay between paternal care and sexual selection
The realization that the offspring may be sired by a different male than the one providing expensive care raised fundamental questions in the field of evolutionary biology about how paternal effort may have evolved by natural selection. Theory postulates that males that invest in care proportionally to their expected paternity should have been favored, thus avoiding expenditures towards unrelated offspring. Although empirical evidence shows some support for such association, extensive unexplained variation remains, specially regarding high levels of cuckoldry in species with male-only care, when males exclusively pay the costs of being responsible for offspring survival. Built on the results from the other projects and on growing evidence in the literature about the costs of paternal care and its trade-off with other fitness components, I am working on an alternative hypothesis that explores how natural variation in the extent of the costs associated with paternal behavior can affect fertilization and, ultimately, paternity patterns, reverting the relationship between paternal effort and paternity. I am addressing this question using evolutionary game theory models and I intend to test some of the predictions empirically, through multi-species comparative analyses with different taxa where the required behavioral and phylogenetic data are available.
I recently co-organized a workshop (with Dr. Charlotta Kvarnemo, University of Gothenburg) about this topic. Sponsored by the Gothenburg Centre for Advanced Studies in Science & Technology (GoCAS) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), we hosted a conference in Fiskebäckskil (Sweden), where 41 researchers (from 21 countries and associated with 27 institutions) found a cozy and relaxed atmosphere to discuss the interplay between parental care and sexual selection. More details about the event here and here.
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