Dr Giuseppe Boncoraglio

Email: gb406 at cam.ac.uk

Former Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow

Understanding the factors that determine the costliness of reproduction is key to understanding several key biological processes such as senescence, parental care and social evolution. Among other things, early developmental environment is supposed to play an important role: restricted resource intake in early life is likely to result in increased vulnerability of some tissues in the body associated with reproducing, and individuals which develop in poor environments then suffer greater reproductive costs in adult life. To date, however, this suggestive idea has yet to be tested explicitly. Moreover, although parental care influences the quality of the early developmental environment, its long-term influence on the subsequent cost of offspring reproduction has not yet been considered.

My project aims at investigating how variation in the early developmental environment influences the costliness of reproduction sustained in later life, and the knock-on effects for individual senescence, parental care and social evolution. To this purpose, under the supervision of Rebecca Kilner and Rufus Johnstone I will combine state-dependent theoretical modelling and experimental laboratory work on the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, in order to understand how individuals receiving a variable amount of care in their early life cope with the costs and trade-offs imposed by reproduction, against a background of unpredictable variation in environmental conditions.

Other Ongoing Projects:

Together with Nicola Saino’s group at the University of Milan, I am interested in the study of factors affecting the expression of begging behaviour and sibling competition in birds. I am currently pursuing three main research lines: effects of kinship among broodmates, individual and competitors’ sex, and maternal effects mediated by egg quality.

With the same research group, I am carrying out a second project aiming at assessing the trade-offs and constraints influencing the evolution of bird song acoustics. Both environmental (e.g. habitat effect) and ecological (e.g. predation risk) factors are currently under scrutiny.

Finally, together with Ton Groothuis’ group at the University of Groningen, I am investigating the role of hormone-mediated maternal effects in determining the resolution of parent-offspring and sibling conflicts in avian families. Understanding why systematic variation within clutch in yolk androgen allocation occurs, and the factors explaining variation across species in androgen allocation patterns adopted over the laying sequence are the main aims of this project.

• BONCORAGLIO G., KILNER R.M. 2012. Female burying beetles benefit from male desertion: sexual conflict and counter-adaptation over parental investment. PLoS One 7: e31713.
• BONCORAGLIO G., CAPRIOLI M., SAINO N. 2012. Solicitation displays reliably reflect oxidative damage in barn swallow nestlings. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 66: 539-546.
• BONCORAGLIO G., GROOTHUIS T.G.G., VON ENGELHARDT N. 2011. Differential maternal testosterone allocation among siblings benefits both mother and offspring in the zebra finch Taeniopygia guttata. American Naturalist 178: 64-74.
• BONCORAGLIO G., CAPRIOLI M., SAINO N. 2009. Fine-tuned modulation of competitive ability according to kinship in barn swallow nestlings. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B – Biological Sciences 276: 2117-2123.
• BONCORAGLIO G., SAINO N., GARAMSZEGI L.Z. 2008. Begging and cowbirds: brood parasites make hosts scream louder. Behavioral Ecology 20: 215-221.
• BONCORAGLIO G., MARTINELLI R., SAINO N. 2008. Sex-related asymmetry in competitive ability of sexually monomorphic barn swallow nestlings. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 62: 729-738
• BONCORAGLIO G., SAINO N. 2008. Barn swallow chicks beg more loudly when broodmates are unrelated. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 21: 256-262.
• BONCORAGLIO G., SAINO N. 2007. Habitat structure and the evolution of bird song: a meta-analysis of the evidence for the acoustic adaptation hypothesis. Functional Ecology 21: 134-142
• BONCORAGLIO G., RUBOLINI D., ROMANO M., MARTINELLI R., SAINO N. 2006. Effects of elevated yolk androgens on perinatal begging behavior in yellow-legged gull (Larus michahellis) chicks. Hormones and Behavior 50: 442-447.