Summary: TRENDS in Ecology & Evolution Vol.16 No.3 March 2001
http://tree.trends.com 0169­5347/01/$ ­ see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Every so often, a hypothesis comes along
that contains an idea that makes you
wonder why no one has thought of it before.
A recent paper by T.E. Martin et al.1 contains
such a conceptual leap.
In 1949, A.F. Skutch provided an original
hypothesis regarding the evolution of
parental care behaviour in birds. The
hypothesis was that nest predation should
increase with increasing parental activity at
the nest, thus predicting that parental
activity and nest predation show opposite
proximate and evolutionary relationships.
That is, nest predation is expected to
increase with parental activity within
species to give a positive proximate cost

Source: Agrawal, Anurag - Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Entomollogy, Cornell University

Collections: Environmental Sciences and Ecology