Parental care is a crucial component of reproduction as it increases fitness through improved offspring development and survival. However, although any parental contribution is beneficial for the offspring, it
is at the expense of the parents’ survival and their future breeding
success. The amount of care parents are willing to provide is thus
limited by an associated cost, creating important life-history
trade-offs. To complicate matters, each offspring is more closely
related to itself than to any of its siblings, while parents are equally
related to each of their offspring. As a result, offspring will seek
greater parental investment than parents are selected to provide.
The project aims to study the evolutionary ecology of parental care in wild birds with focus on:
· the role of parent-offspring conflict in shaping parent-offspring communication
· the functional consequences of co-adaptation between parental provisioning and offspring begging
· prenatal matching of offspring development to the parental capacity via maternal effects.
· phenotypic plasticity of parental provisioning and offspring begging in heterogeneous environments
Further reading: Müller et al. Am Nat 2007, Dingemanse et al. TREE 2010, Hinde et al. Science 2010
Profile and requirements:
• You hold a MSc degree in Biology or a related field
• You have experience with animal research
• You are interested in behavioural ecology and evolutionary ecology
Offer :
• The possibility to join a dynamic group of researchers working on all four major aspects of animal behaviour: causation, development, function and
evolution
• Significant freedom in developing your own research interests
• An initial 1-year contract, extendable for up to 4 years following a positive evaluation
• The position should yield a Ph.D. degree of the University of Antwerp
• The position will be available from October 2010 onwards
If Interested :
Please send all application material including 1) your curriculum vitae 2) a brief (250 words) summary of your reasons for applying and 3) a letter
of reference as single PDF-file to wendt.muller@ua.ac.be .
Closing date: 15 September 2010.
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