Submitted Abstract
Sex roles are among the most diverse social behaviours and are generally characterised by 4 key elements i.e. courtship, competition for mates, pair-bonding and parenting. Understanding the diversity of sexual behaviour is at the core of evolutionary biology and is essential for the study of life history evolution, physiology and population. Here, I use shorebirds (they exhibit extraordinary diversity in mating and parenting strategies) as a model study system to uncover the relationship between sex role associated traits and how selection acts on them and their genetic architecture. Furthermore, I will combine social network analysis and quantitative genetics first to investigate how social interactions may drive and maintain variation seen in social behaviours and second to estimate the heritability of sex role associated social traits to then predict the evolutionary trajectories of these traits. Here, I will first consider a well-monitored Kentish plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) population in Maio, Cape Verde and then extend my analyses to other Charadrius populations across the world exhibiting diversity in mating and parenting strategies. This integrative approach will fill important gaps in the fields of evolutionary biology, animal behaviour and genetics and provide a complete understanding of the underlying causes and the evolution of sex role behaviours. Finally, its significance goes beyond evolutionary biology as the resulting datasets will be very valuable to biodiversity conservation and assessing global changes in vulnerable shorebird population structures.