PhD defence Wenxia Wang
The effects of ecological and social factors on life history trade-offs and sex differences in parental care in burying beetles
Biparental care occurs when males and females cooperate to care for their offspring. In the majority of species with biparental care, females provide more parental care than males. Such sex-specific parental sex roles may originate from diverging resource allocation decisions and life history trade-offs between males and females. The resource allocation decisions may be influenced by a broad range of social (e.g. sexual conflict and cooperation, parent-offspring interactions, sibling competition and cooperation) and ecological (e.g. humidity, temperature, resource quantity, nutritional conditions, and parasites) factors and/or their interactions. Despite extensive research on the effects of social and ecological factors over the past few decades, it remains unclear whether males and females respond differently to these factors, and whether these factors interact to shape sex-specific resource allocation decisions and life history trade-offs. Burying beetles (Nicrophorus vespilloides) provide an excellent model for this type of study, because they exhibit high flexibility in parental care patterns (i.e. no care, uniparental care, biparental care). Therefore, the main goals of my thesis are twofold: First, to examine whether males and females dynamically adjust their sex-specific parental sex roles based on social factors, ecological factors, and the interactive effects between them. Second, to investigate whether these adjustments influence the resource allocation and life history trade-offs in burying beetles.