Social and environmental determinants of successful parents

In many species, reproduction requires parents to care for young in diverse ways including defending offspring from threats and provisioning them with food. Understanding the forces that drive the evolution of these different parenting strategies has key implications for our understanding of conflict and cooperation in nature. Two key forces are expected to influence the success of different parental care strategies: i) variation in ecological environments parents face, including temperatures and food abundance, and ii) the social environment they encounter, which influences the intensity of competition, conflict and the availability of social information. However, it remains uncovered how parents balance strategies to successfully navigate their ecological environment over the year, while adopting social strategies that minimise conflict and optimise cooperative strategies. Our overarching aim is to disentangle the consequences of the social and ecological environment individuals face on the evolution of different parental reproductive strategies. We address this aim in an Austrian-Hungarian collaboration by utilising automated sensing technology to characterise the movement patterns of individual Kentish plovers (Charadrius alexandrinus), a small shorebird where males and females cooperate to raise their precocial offspring. We will integrate the movement of individual parents to infer their social networks and combine this information with detailed observations of parental care behaviour, and measures of their reproductive success to disentangle the consequences of social and environmental variation on the evolution of parental reproductive strategies.