Biodiversity Research Seminar Series (BRS)

BRS Alison Bell: The evolutionary loss of paternal care in sticklebacks

March 2, 2022, 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

2212 Main Mall

host: Mank Lab

Title: The evolutionary loss of paternal care in sticklebacks

Abstract: Nature has experimented with many different ways to organize a family. For example, among those animal species that provide parental care, there’s tremendous diversity in who is primarily responsible for taking care of offspring after birth. In some cases it’s the mom who assumes primary responsibility, in other species both parents care for offspring, in others the dad has primary child caring duties, and of course in most animals, most offspring are entirely on their own after fertilization and don’t get any help at all from their parents. So the way that responsibilities for promoting the survival of the next generation are distributed is highly variable in nature, which means that there’s tremendous diversity in the ways in which the burdens and costs of reproduction are divvied up among family members, with many opportunities for coordination, cooperation, and conflict. These negotiations have proven to be fertile ground for studying coadaptation and antagonism among family members, and all the entangled interests which shape the evolution of family life. Over the last several years my lab has been investigating these questions in threespined sticklebacks, a critter famous for exhibiting tremendous phenotypic variation among populations of the same species, including in social behavior and family life. Typically, stickleback fathers are solely responsible for caring for the offspring, but there is an unusual ecotype in which parental care has been lost. I’ll present data from my lab on the neurogenomics, inheritance and evolution of paternal care, and how the evolutionary loss of parental care in this system is associated with coevolutionary shifts in other members of the family.

Topic: Biodiversity Research Seminar Series

Start Time: Mar 2, 2022 11:42 AM

Meeting Recording:

https://ubc.zoom.us/rec/share/zmhO7NuRe3Jwf1p3uZQ3Zls-Lv3cNPok6Ee-cjhOe…-

Access Passcode: This presentation is available to the BRC community at UBC, but not a wider audience. Please contact Katie (katie.beall@ubc.ca)  for the passcode.


  • Biodiversity Research Seminar Series (BRS)

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