Project: DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Negotiations Over Offspring Care: A Test of Alternative Hypotheses Using the Clown Anemonefish

NSF Award Abstract:
Conflict is a pervasive feature of animal societies. Conflicts arise whenever the interests of interacting individuals are not wholly aligned, yet many social interactions require individuals to reach some compromise. Parental care is an interaction that is rife with conflict, because both parents benefit from shifting the burden of care to the other, yet requires cooperation, because both parents benefit from the total amount of care. The outcome of conflict between parents has been modeled using economic game theory models, which assume that individuals act in their best interest but that their optimal behavior depends on how others behave. This project will build on existing empirical and theoretical work to test alternative hypotheses for how parents negotiate care utilizing a tractable study system: the clown anemonefish a.k.a. Nemo. Studying how conflict among caring parents is resolved is critical to understanding why animals, including humans, form such alliances. Undergraduates involved in the project will receive training in aquarium maintenance, assist in ongoing research, and complete independent research projects. This project will also encourage participation of underrepresented groups in science through the researchers' participation in Science Club for Girls and through work with local school groups at the Mahonia Na Dari field station. The results will be broadly disseminated through presentations at international scientific meetings and development of "data nuggets" (http://datanuggets.org/) to ensure that results are available in a format that will enhance public understanding.

The existence of biparental care poses a perplexing evolutionary question because parents must coordinate their behavior to raise offspring when there are costs to providing care and inherent conflicts of interest among parents. The objective of this project is to test plausible alternative hypotheses for the factors that govern how parents negotiate the amount of care to provide to their offspring, and create a more general framework for understanding conflict resolution. The researchers will test four alternative hypotheses for how parents negotiate the amount of care to provide to their offspring: H0) Parental effort is fixed; H1) Parental effort is negotiated based on partner effort alone; H2) Parental effort is negotiated with an information asymmetry; H3) Parental effort is negotiated with a power asymmetry; H4) Parental effort is negotiated with a simple form of reciprocity. Experiments will be conducted in a natural population of clown anemonefish (Amphiprion percula) in Papua New Guinea. By supplementing food resources, effort by each parent will be manipulated in a non-invasive and ecologically relevant manner. The anemonefish system allows tests of alternative hypotheses simultaneously, where previous studies have only tested them in isolation. Furthermore, the majority of negotiation studies have been conducted in birds, so utilizing A. percula will test the generality of theoretical predictions. In sum, the proposed research will use a tractable study species together with a rigorous alternative hypothesis testing approach to determine the factors that influence the outcome of negotiations. While incorporating teaching, training and learning, this research will create a more general framework for studying conflict resolution and revise our understanding of negotiations over offspring care.