Doctoral Dissertation Research: Behavior and energetics of parenting

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Cooperative infant care in which multiple individuals contribute to caring for a single offspring is thought to have played a key role in human evolution by reducing the energy mothers need to invest in their offspring. It can be challenging to disentangle the relationship between energetic costs and benefits of care provided by multiple individuals, and the study of this question can benefit from the examination of other species with similar forms of cooperative infant care. The simplest form, where infants receive care from only their mother and father, is called biparental care. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project measures energy expenditure related to infant care in primate species with biparental cooperative infant care. Behavioral data, movement data, and metabolic measurements of energy use during infant care are combined from wild and captive populations to investigate how these monkeys distribute the energetic costs of childcare responsibilities. The project supports long-term research and scientists at a field station and produces short bilingual videos to disseminate results. To quantify the relative investment of male and female parents in the care of their infants, this research combines behavioral data from both coppery titi monkeys with activity and energetics data. Coppery titi monkey mothers and fathers each specialize in some caring tasks: mothers nurse and fathers carry the infant. However, the extent of sex-based specialization for other caring behaviors, such as grooming and tolerated food theft remains unknown as does the energetic burden of these behaviors and any compensatory changes in the parents’ activity. Activity data will be collected throughout the entire period of infant care , andallows inferences about the energetic investment parents make during infant care to be made on both behavioral and physiological bases since the measures of energy use will be in the context of behavior and activity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.