Project leader: Eva Ringler
Post-doc: Diogo Antunes
PhD students: TBA
Collaborators: Eva Fischer, Lisa Schulte, Virginie Canoine, Lauren O'Connell
Funded by the Swiss National Science Fund (SNSF). http://www.snf.ch/
How can animal behaviour remain robust over evolutionary time and still be flexible at the individual level? While the ecological and evolutionary significance of behavioural plasticity is well recognized, we still know little about the physiological processes that facilitate flexibly switching between several, potentially conflicting behaviours. To understand how animals manage dynamical behavioural adjustment to changing environmental contexts, we need to identify mechanisms that enable - or constrain - behavioural flexibility in ecologically relevant settings both within as well as between sexes. The goal of this project is to reveal how cognitive, hormonal, and neuronal mechanisms act together in flexibly balancing contrasting behavioural decisions. We hypothesise that trade-offs between aggressive and parental behaviours also manifest on a physiological level, and that short-term changes in steroid release and/or sensitivity may provide animals with a mechanism for adapting their behavioural responses to rapidly changing environmental conditions. We leverage the unique strengths of our study system, the poison frog Allobates femoralis, to explore how individuals balance aggressive and parental states. A key feature of this study system is that we can experimentally induce aggressive and parental behaviour in both males and females, under both complex natural conditions in the field as well as in a controlled lab setting. We have designed three work packages (WPs) to identify decision-rules for balancing aggression and care (WP1), reveal the endocrine regulation of distinct social behaviours (WP2), and identify essential brain regions as well as gene expression patterns in those regions that are associated with aggressive and parental behaviours (WP3). Synthesis across the WPs will provide essential insight into mechanisms that shape behavioural variation at multiple levels: 1) we will be able to link distinct behaviours to their underlying neuro-endocrinological mechanisms, 2) reveal sex-specific differences in the control of social behaviour, and 3) identify environmental and physiological facilitators and constraints of behavioural flexibility. This integrative view on animal behaviour - from genes to hormones to neurons to behaviour - will provide key insights into the regulation of social behaviour.
