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Professor of Zoology
Phone: (405)325-6204
Fax: (405)325-6202RM/Lab: SH206
Current Research Interests and Subject Areas Available for Graduate Research
Most of my research has focused on sexual selection, mating systems, and parental care. I have been especially interested in how the spatial and temporal availability of potential mates affects evolution of various male traits. For example, in the populations of 13-lined ground squirrels that I've studied, females are spatially scattered yet breed relatively synchronously. Moreover, females tend to mate with more than one male, and the resulting sperm competition features a first-male advantage. This combination of female spatial dispersion, female breeding synchrony, and paternity skewed toward the first mate of females appears to have favored male mobility, spatial memory, the ability of males to distinguish how soon certain females will become sexually receptive, plus an element of male "choosiness" based on the mating history of a prospective mate.
Some of the collaborative work I've done on a local population of house sparrows also has examined how the characteristics/behavior of one sex affect the optimum behavior/traits of the opposite sex. We recently used an experimental approach to determine the sensitivity of male and female parents to alterations in their mates’ contributions to nestling provisioning. ESS models of this situation have yielded one general prediction: if one partner slacks off in the amount it contributes, its mate should never compensate completely for that reduction. Our results showed little evidence that house sparrow parents track their partners’ contributions to feeding nestlings and subsequently adjust their own food deliveries in compensation. We currently are looking at whether compensation for partner shortfalls occurs at other stages of parenting, and we also are exploring sex differences in the costs of providing parental care.
Ph.D., University of Michigan
M.S., University of Michigan
A.B., University of Kentucky
Margaret Morse Nice Medal (2007), Wilson Ornithological Society
Selected publications:
Schwagmeyer, P.L. and D.W. Mock. 2008. Parental provisioning and offspring fitness: size matters. Animal Behaviour 75:291-298.
Schwagmeyer, P. L., Bartlett, T. L. and Schwabl, H.G. 2008. Dynamics of house sparrow biparental care: What contexts trigger partial compensation? Ethology 114:459-468.
Edly-Wright, C., P.L. Schwagmeyer, P.G. Parker, and D.W. Mock. 2007. Genetic similarity of mates, offspring health and extrapair fertilization in house sparrows. Animal Behaviour 73:367-378.
Kopisch, A., P.L. Schwagmeyer, and D.W. Mock. 2005. Individual consistency in parental effort across multiple stages of care in the house sparrow, Passer domesticus. Ethology 111:1062-1070.
Bartlett, T.L., D.W. Mock, and P.L. Schwagmeyer. 2005. Division of labor: Incubation and biparental care in the house sparrow, Passer domesticus. Auk 122:835-842.
Schwagmeyer, P.L., H.G. Schwabl, and D.W. Mock. 2005. Dynamics of biparental care in house sparrows: hormonal manipulations of paternal contributions. Animal Behaviour 69:481-488.
- Mock, D.W., P.L. Schwagmeyer, and G.A. Parker. 2005. Male house sparrows deliver more food to experimentally subsidized offspring. Animal Behaviour 70:225-236.
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