Exam 15: Parental Care and Mating Systems

Males of lek species

Genetic monogamy is

In domestic piglets (Sus scrofa) frantic battles among littermates that occur shortly after birth are made more intense by their possession of

Pribil and Picman (1966) found that in a Canadian population of red-winged blackbirds, all things being equal, females unanimously preferred to settle on the territory of a bachelor male rather than that of an already mated male. When the quality of the territories was altered to make that of the mated male superior to that of the bachelor male, the females

When males defend resources essential to female reproduction, this is known as

Which of the following descriptions would be TRUE in a species that exhibits full sex role reversal?

As a rule, patterns of parental investment should be expected to maximize

Parental decisions about how much of their own resosurces to devote to reproduction instead of to their own growth and survival and about how to allocate the available resources among their offspring can lead to

If you are an adult female cuckoo, about how long will it take you to lay an egg in a nest?

Neff and Sherman (2003) demonstrated that male bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) that spawn when sneaker males are present display lower levels of egg defense than control males. In addition, parental males that had 1/3 of their eggs swapped with those of another parental male decreased their level of egg defense more than controls. Together these results indicate that sunfish adjust their level of care depending on

A male seeking extra-pair matings may

If you are a northern jacana (Jacana spinosa) defending a large territory that encompasses from one to four territories of other individuals, you are almost certainly

When Leach's storm-petrel parents were handicapped by having their wing span shortened, they passed the increased reproductive costs to their offspring and maintained their own nutritional condition. In contrast, when starling or flycatcher parents were handicapped in a way that increased their reproductive costs, they bore at least part of the increased costs themselves and continued to allocate nearly the same amount of resources to their chicks. Given an important difference between the petrels and the starlings and flycatchers, these results most directly support the idea that a parent's allocation of resources is influenced by the

The idea that access to good genes for offspring might compensate a female for the costs of polygyny is referred to as the

Mating systems are frequently defined in terms of the number of copulatory partners per individual per breeding season. When some females mate with more than one male during the breeding season, such as system is referred to as

The degree of certainty that a parent is indeed related to their [purported] offspring is

A difference between the parental care typically provided by birds and that provided by fishes and amphibians is that, in birds, the care is nearly always biparental; in fishes and amphibians it usually takes the form of solitary male care. Which of the following parental behaviors probably accounts for the difference?

The fact that the costs of providing care are paid separately by e4ach parent whereas the benefits accrue to both parents irrespective of which one provides the care can lead to

Trivers (1972) proposed the following, any investment by parents in an offspring that increases the survival of that offspring while decreasing the ability of the parent to invest in other offspring, as the definition of

When females live in groups that a male can easily defend, this is known as