Meeting Abstract
Maternal care is an essential adaptive social behavior for many species, yet the underlying neural mechanisms have largely been addressed in mammalian systems. A new mother’s brain undergoes a fundamental transformation that shapes maternal behavior. We study maternal mouth-brooding in the cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni. In this independently-evolved instance of robust care, the neural circuits regulating maternal behavior are inextricably linked with the feeding circuits to allow voluntary starvation despite significant loss of body mass. Maternal mouth-brooding offers an extreme example of parent-offspring conflict in a tractable system for careful mechanistic studies. We use two different A. burtoni fish stocks, one an inbred labstock inadvertently artificially selected for rapid reproduction and low maternal investment and the other a recently collected wild stock that displays a rich repertoire of maternal care and resistance to starvation induced loss of body condition. We measure behavior, morphological changes, hormone profiles and gene expression patterns throughout the brooding cycle. We focus on two important transitions, spawning and release of fry, in order to identify key mechanisms that underlie the good mother phenotype in the wildstock females.
