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Andrew Zink
Behavioral Biology Hensill 436 |
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| Research Interests: As a behavioral ecologist I am interested in the evolutionary and ecological processes that generate the broad diversity of animal behavior. My research involves the evolution of social behavior with a specific focus on the evolution of parental care and communal breeding. Many animals decrease the costs of parental care by raising their offspring with other parents in a communal group. However individual parents within these groups often experience large asymmetries in the number of offspring that they produce and the amount of care that they provide. My work attempts to understand how these asymmetries can be maintained within social groups and how group members act to resolve these conflicts over reproduction and parental care. My general approach is 1) to develop mathematical models that are applicable to a broad range of social animals and 2) to test the predictions of these (and other) models using laboratory and field experiments on social insects. |
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| Recent Publications & Presentations (** = grad student): Loeb, M.L.G. and A.G. Zink. 2006. Fitness conflicts and the costs of sociality in communal egg layers: a theoretical model and empirical tests. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 19:889-899. Zink, A.G. and J.A. Rosenheim. 2005. Stage-dependent feeding behavior by western tarnished plant bugs influences flower bud abscission in cotton plants. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 117:235-242. Zink, A.G. 2005. The dynamics of brood desertion among communally breeding females in the treehopper Publilia concava. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 58:466-473. Zink, A.G. and H.K. Reeve. 2005. Predicting the temporal dynamics of reproductive skew and group membership in communal breeders. Behavioral Ecology 16:880-888. Zink, A.G. and J.A. Rosenheim. 2004. State-dependent sampling bias in insects: implications for monitoring western tarnished plant bugs. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 113:117-123. Zink, A.G. 2003. Quantifying the costs and benefits of parental care in female treehoppers. Behavioral Ecology 14:687-693 Zink, A.G. 2003. Intraspecific brood parasitism as a conditional reproductive tactic in the treehopper Publilia concava. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 54:406-415. Zink, A.G. 2001. The optimal degree of parental care asymmetry among communal breeders. Animal Behaviour 61: 439-446. Zink, A.G. 2000. The evolution of intraspecific brood parasitism in birds and insects. The American Naturalist 155: 395-405.
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