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SUMMARY:Parental care: an evolutionary case of “use it or lose it” - E
 llie Bladon\, Department of Zoology\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20220527T164500Z
DTEND:20220527T180000Z
UID:TALK174194@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Matthew Hayes
DESCRIPTION:Phenotypic plasticity enables animals to flexibly adjust their
  behaviour to their social environment – sometimes through the expressio
 n of adaptive traits that have not been exhibited for several generations.
  The ability to revive these ‘ghosts of adaptations past’ could prove 
 beneficial for populations living in a changing world. For this reason\, i
 t is important to understand how long adaptive traits can persist if they 
 are no longer routinely expressed. For many animals parental care is a fun
 damental social interaction\, but one that could potentially be subject to
  change in a world being challenged by climate change and habitat destruct
 ion. By creating evolutionary lines of  burying beetles Nicrophorus vespil
 loides\, an insect that shows highly unusual and somewhat gruesome parenta
 l care\, and allowing them to exhibit contrasting regimes of parental care
  for nearly 50 generations\, we investigated whether even traits fundament
 al to a species’ natural history start to decay irretrievably when not e
 xpressed over evolutionary time. I’ll be presenting the results of these
  experiments and asking what this means for our understanding of the relat
 ive costs and benefits of parental care\, and what implications this has f
 or conservation captive breeding programmes and animal husbandry technique
 s.
LOCATION:Roger Needham Room\, Wolfson College
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