Being a parent is hard. Being a single parent is even harder. Nearly 90% of bird species exhibit a bi-parental care strategy, which means both mom and dad care for their young. However, unpredictable conditions including predation, sickness, and inclement weather can result in single parenthood. To continue caring for their young as the sole caregiver, the surviving parent must often compensate for the loss of a partner. To investigate the costs of single parenting, investigations have focused on understanding how being raised be a single parent affects offspring. However, what are the consequences of single parenting on the single parent? Even lesser known is how might these consequences differ between single mothers versus single fathers. The investigator has been successfully using the socially monogamous, bi-parental model of the rock dove (Columba livia) to study the neurobiology of parental care. Now, the investigator will use an integration of behavioral, neural, physiological, genomic, cellular, and evolutionary biology to produce a holistic view of the causes and consequences of single parenting on the single parent, between mothers and fathers, and at a scale and mechanistic depth unmatched by previous work. The information generated will have broad potential applications to be utilized by scientists in many fields, ranging from management of captive breeding programs for conservation or agricultural purposes, to treatment for neural deficiencies in parent-offspring bonding in humans and other animals. This project will also support the innovation, evaluation, and enhancement of the investiator's large, predominantly Latino/a/x undergraduate research training program.
This project will vertically integrate and experimentally manipulate genome-phenome-fitness relationships across biological levels, sexes, and time scales to investigate proximate and ultimate mechanisms underlying single parent behaviors in a bi-parental system. The central hypothesis is that single parenting in a bi-parental system will result in sex-biased changes in neural genomic transcription and reproductive behaviors, and these changes are related to trade-offs between current and future reproductive success. The immediate and guaranteed significance of the results gained from this project include the characterization of single and paired male and female parental care behavior, neural transcription, and reproductive success. Aims are necessarily independent and will generate their own novel contributions; however, when assessed together, their synergy will shine a bright light on genome to phenome to fitness relationships in single mothers and fathers and paired counterparts. This project will generate large genomic datasets and identify critical genes associated with tradeoffs experienced during single parenthood. All data and computer code will be made publicly available in established repositories and shared openly with the scientific community. Vital to this project is the creation of substantial research opportunities for predominantly Latino/a/x undergraduate trainees, resulting in a reciprocal relationship between research and undergraduate education while strengthening diversity in STEM. The investigator will leverage her knowledge of running a successful and diverse undergraduate research program in Integrative Animal Behavior to provide a framework for research-intensive labs for how to offer quality, large-scale undergraduate research experiences that in turn support the research progress of the lab.
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.
