Parental care improves the survival of offspring and therefore has a major impact on reproductive success. It is increasingly recognized that coordinated biparental care is necessary to ensure the survival of offspring in hostile environments, but little is known about the influence of environmental fluctuations on parental cooperation. Here the influence of environmental stochasticity on biparental incubation in a cosmopolitan ground-nesting avian genus is investigated.

Parental environment can widely influence offspring phenotype, but paternal effects in the absence of parental care remain poorly understood. This study looks at the question if protein content in the larval diet of fathers affected paternity success and gene expression in their sons.

The behavioural rhythms of organisms are thought to be under strong selection, influenced by the rhythmicity of the environment. Such behavioural rhythms are well studied in isolated individuals under laboratory conditions, but free-living individuals have to temporally synchronize their activities with those of others, including potential mates, competitors, prey and predators. The behavioural rhythms that emerge from social synchronization and the underlying evolutionary and ecological...