Meeting Abstract
In the majority of bird species whom employ biparental care, males provide decreasing levels of care with increasing uncertainty of paternity. In the male-only parental care system, relatively uncommon in birds, providing care for young that the male has not sired, can have high detrimental effects on current additional mating’s as well as on his future fecundity. It therefore follows, that if males are able to unambiguously determine paternity, then they may adjust investment in the form of parental care to match their own levels of paternity in a clutch. The Australian emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae, is a socially monogamous ground nesting bird, with male-only parental care. Parental care for this species is predominantly in the form of incubation, with precocial chicks requiring only protection from the father. It therefore is an ideal species for easily studying the influence of parentage on incubation behaviour in a male-only parental care species, as well as assessing whether females mate more and lay more eggs of a larger size in the nest of males who provide greater parental care. In this study we measure nest attendance and maintenance, clutch size, egg size and hatching success, to determine how these features correlate with molecular paternity. By studying what features of emu mating and nesting behaviour predict patterns of molecular parentage, we aim to better understand the trade-off between parental care and additional mating’s, in a male-only parental care system.
