Fall 2024

Talks are Tuesdays at: 08:00 (PDT), 11:00 (EDT), 17:00 (CEST), 20:30 (IST), 01:00 (Wednesday, AEST)

Eduardo Fernandez-Duque and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Title: Titi and Owl Monkey Fathers: A Life-Long Perspective on the Evolution of Paternal Care. Recorded Talk.

Date: 03 September 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Father Time. A Natural History of Men and Babies.

2. The evolution of pair-living, sexual monogamy, and cooperative infant care: Insights from research on wild owl monkeys, titi monkeys, sakis, and tamarins.

3. Correlates of genetic monogamy in pair-living mammals: Insights from monogamous Azara’s owl monkeys.

Yitzchak Ben Mocha

Title: Advancing cooperative breeding research with a comprehensive and “live” Cooperative-Breeding Database (Co-BreeD).

Date: 10 September 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Evidence for a reproductive sharing continuum in cooperatively breeding mammals and birds: consequences for comparative research.

2. What is cooperative breeding in mammals and birds? Removing definitional barriers for comparative research.

3. Advancing cooperative breeding research with a peer-reviewed and “live” Cooperative-Breeding Database (Co-BreeD).

Robin V. Vijayan

Title: Unraveling the complexities in the songs of an endemic Shola Sky Island bird.

Date: 17 September 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. The deepest, widest valleys cause nested phylogeographic patterns congruent with paleo-climate across a montane bird community.

2. Singing from the skies: Geographic and individual variation of bird song in a threatened, endemic bird on the sky islands of southern India.

3. Spectrogram cross-correlation can be used to measure the complexity of bird vocalizations.

Jen Moss

Title: Unpacking thermal effects on social behavior through integrative approaches.

Date: 24 September 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Thermal plasticity in behavioral traits mediates mating and reproductive dynamics in an ectotherm.

2. Gene expression underlying parenting and being parented shows limited plasticity in response to different ambient temperatures.

3. The thermal environment as a moderator of social evolution.

Eugenia Natoli

Title: Multiple paternity as a measure of an ineffective male reproductive strategy: the case of free-ranging unowned urban domestic cats.

Date: 01 October 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Influence of oestrus synchronization on male reproductive success in the domestic cat (Felis catus L.).

2. Coexistence between Humans and ‘Misunderstood’ Domestic Cats in the Anthropocene: Exploring Behavioural Plasticity as a Gatekeeper of Evolution.

3. The intrinsic moral value of individuals: A bioethical approach to domestic cats and damaged species.

Matthew Silk

Title: How demography and disease shape animal social network dynamics.

Date: 08 October 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Differentiated Social Relationships and the Pace-of-Life-History.

2. Social ageing can protect against infectious disease in a group-living primate.

3. Diversity in valuing social contact and risk tolerance leading to the emergence of homophily in populations facing infectious threats.

No Seminar

Title: N/A

Date: 15 October 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. N/A

2. N/A

3. N/A

Sylvia Kaiser

Title: The modulation of behavioural profiles by the social environment during sensitive phases of life.

Date: 22 October 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. The power of infochemicals in mediating individualized niches.

2. Sensitive phases in the development of rodent social behavior.

3. The adaptive shaping of social behavioural phenotypes during adolescence.

Lauren O’Connell

Title: Family dynamics in a biparental amphibian.

Date: 29 October 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Androgenic shifts and external cues mediate infanticide in mimic poison frogs.

2. Dopamine neurons govern olfactory-gated infant begging behavior.

3. Lessons from poison frogs on ecological drivers of behavioral diversification.

Liam R. Dougherty

Title: Truth, lies, and the mating game: sexual signalling honesty across the animal kingdom.

Date: 05 November 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Do sexual ornaments demonstrate heightened condition-dependent expression as predicted by the handicap hypothesis?

2. Meta-analysis reveals that animal sexual signalling behaviour is honest and resource-based.

3. Ornaments indicate parasite load only if they are dynamic or parasites are contagious.

Nick Royle

Title: Social plasticity and the evolution of parental care in burying beetles.

Date: 12 November 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Are older parents less flexible? Testing age-dependent plasticity in Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles.

2. Chapter Four: Covetable corpses and plastic beetles – the socio-ecological behavior of burying beetles.

3. The evolution of flexible parenting.

4. Revisiting the ecology and evolution of burying beetle behavior (Staphylinidae: Silphinae).

Jacobus (Koos) Boomsma

Title: Abandoning Eusociality because it is Incompatible with Inclusive Fitness Theory.

Date: 19 November 2024

Suggested Readings:

1. Superorganismality and caste differentiation as points of no return: how the major evolutionary transitions were lost in translation.

2. Domains and Major Transitions of Social Evolution.