A new paper written by our former Postdoc, Matt Dugas, was published in Behavioral Ecology this month. In it, Matt describes a project he completed in our lab that focused on how resource limitation shapes the nuclear family, even for an ectotherm living in captivity.
Summary: Mother strawberry poison frogs (Oophaga pumilio) lay unfertilized eggs to feed their developing tadpoles, and this provisioning is beneficial to tadpoles. However, these caring mothers forgo alternative, new, reproductive opportunities, and seem to be limited, even when resources are superabundant: Tadpoles in larger broods are fed less, develop more slowly, and in the largest broods, are less likely to survive.
