Eva K Fischer: Mar 23rd 

Who cares? Lessons on parenting from poison frogs

University of California Davis

Summary: A fundamental question at the intersection of evolution, behavior, and neurobiology is how novel behaviors arise and are incorporated into existing neural systems. The emergence of traits initially exhibited only in one sex in the opposite sex has been proposed as a major, though underappreciated, force in the evolution of novel behavior. Yet the mechanisms that facilitate the integration of new behavior into opposite sex physiological, neural, and molecular systems are largely unknown. We leverage naturally occurring variation in parental behavior in Neotropical poison frogs to understand how interactions across levels of biological organization drive similarities, differences, and occasional reversals in parental behavior between sexes.