Meeting Abstract
A longstanding focus of my research has been to bridge levels of analysis from mechanism to adaptation. One of the first avenues in this pursuit was to understand the role of androgens in mating and parental care behavior in bluegill sunfish. This interest began when I met Rosemary Knapp in 2002, at the EEEF conference, and our collaboration began. Some of our first work together revealed that circulating androgen levels in parental male bluegill show a consistent pattern during breeding bouts: starting highest when males were mating with females, declining while the males were providing parental care, and then increasing again as parental care came to an end. To understand this pattern, we first examined the value of high androgen levels during mating, and found that males with high levels sired a greater proportion of the offspring in their nest, thereby increasing their fitness. Next, we experimentally manipulated androgen levels during parental care and showed that high androgen levels reduced males’ nurturing behavior toward the offspring, providing a potential adaptive explanation for the drop in androgen levels during parental care. Our work, which was sadly cut short, was beginning to examine the interplay between androgens and prolactin, as well as identifying specific genes that underlie parental and mating behavior and their fitness consequences.
