Abstract
Most individuals encounter a social environment at birth, as they are born into a family. This social context has significant consequences for the offspring, as a disproportionate part of phenotypic organisation occurs early in life. Parents, and in particular mothers, have significant effects on the offspring's phenotypic organisation, as they are an essential part of the family, and via maternal effects, which allows mothers to adaptively shape the social phenotype of the offspring for the social environment later in life. However, this has rarely been studied, as the focus has mostly been on maladaptation, e.g. how maternal exposure to stressful social events impairs the development of social skills in offspring. Using the blue tit as study model my project aims to unveil the link between maternal anticipatory cues, offspring social phenotypes, and the adaptive value by investigating 1) how the maternal social environment triggers differential allocation of maternal cues; 2) whether maternal effects irreversibly shape the social behaviour of offspring; 3) how these effects are modulated by the (maternally programmed) expression of quality signals; 4) which fitness consequences arise from long-lasting maternal social programming and reciprocal effects. The outcome of my project expands the current state of knowledge as it provides novel information among others about the extent of individual variation in social performance and its consequences for group organisation.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)