Becca Hale awarded a Mid Career Advancement award from the National Science Foundation to explore mating systems in salamanders with Dr. Todd Pierson at Kennesaw State University.
The project, which began in January 2023, develops genetic tools to describe mating decisions in three species of salamander, all in the genus Ambystoma. The species – the marbled, ringed, and spotted salamanders (pictured at left) – mate and breed in wetlands in the southeast, but they differ in when they breed and where they lay their eggs. The project explores the decisions of females to mate with more than one male before laying eggs.
Drs. Hale and Pierson will identify variable genetic markers that will allow to determine the parentage of individual offspring. Importantly, this will allow them to measure how many dads have fathered offspring in a single clutch of eggs – an indirect way to determine how many males females have mated with.
What’s so interesting about salamander promiscuity? Hale and her colleagues are interested in the evolution of social behavior and whether different aspects of social behavior, such as mating and parental care, evolve in a correlated fashion. Such correlation would be predicted if the underlying genetic and neural mechanisms controlling these related behaviors are the same. Describing the mating decisions of these animals is a first step toward exploring this hypothesis.
You can read about the project here.