Mother-offspring conflict and coevolution in Soay sheep

Applications are accepted all year round but note that supervisors are asked to nominate their favoured candidates for our studentships competition by Jan 10th 2012

Interested individuals should use the link below to apply online indicating on the form which supervisor they wish to study with and should also email their CV and a one page statement of research interests directly to the supervisor.

Interviews will be held week beginning 6th February 2012

In many animals, parents provide some form care (e.g. provisioning, nest defence) that increases the expected survival of their offspring. However, while receiving care is beneficial for offspring fitness, providing care is expected to be costly to the parent (by reducing their future survival or reproduction). This raises the potential for parent-offspring conflict to occur over how much care should be provided. Selection through offspring fitness may often favour provision of more care, while selection through parental fitness may actually favour less.

This project will study the potential for mother-offspring conflict over the allocation of maternal provisioning (nursing) in a wild population of Soay sheep on the island of Hirta, St Kilda, Scotland. It will explore the fitness consequences – for mothers and lambs - of variation in nursing and suckling behaviour, and examine the questions of who controls the amount of care given, and whether control changes between birth and weaning. Additionally, by applying quantitative genetic methods, the project will quantify the genetic basis variation in maternal and offspring behaviour, offspring growth, and fitness itself. This is important because any evolutionary response to selection on parental care traits depends on the genetic basis of (co)variation for these traits. By estimating quantitative genetic parameters it is possible to ask whether maternal-offspring conflict causes an evolutionary constraint in this system, or whether there is potential for coevolution. The project will involve analyses of existing data from a long-term study of the sheep, as well as extensive periods of field work in the remote and challenging environment of St Kilda.