Cooperatively breeding bell miners (Manorina melanophrys) have numerous male helpers assisting at multiple nests. Helpers are often related to the brood they aid, consistent with kin selection. However, there are also unrelated helpers for which other direct fitness benefits are likely to...

Variance sensitivity theory predicts that optimal foragers should take into account not only the mean but also the variance in rewards offered by alternative foraging options. Whereas a positive energy budget should favor variance aversion, a negative one should favor variance-prone choices. The...

Nuptial gifts are any nutritious items or inedible tokens transferred from the male to the female as a part of courtship or copulation. Although nuptial gift donation has been studied in a variety of taxa, this behavior has been largely overlooked in Drosophila. We studied nuptial feeding in...

The ability to alter primary sex ratios has the potential to increase a breeding individual's fitness. This is certainly true in those cooperative breeders where one sex is both philopatric and helps raise future offspring of its parents. We examined the primary sex ratio variation in the...

Models of parent--offspring conflict and nestling begging honesty often assume that signaling is associated with increased predation risk. However, little evidence exists that begging actually increases predation in the context in which it evolved, especially when the potentially modulating...

An overabundance of hypotheses have been proposed to account for reversed sexual size dimorphism (RSD; females the larger sex) in raptors. Previous research principally focused on examining interspecific patterns of RSD, rarely testing predictions of various hypotheses within populations. To...

Fisher's theory predicts equal sex ratios at the end of parental care if the costs and benefits associated with raising each sex of offspring are equal. In raptors, which display various degrees of reversed sexual size dimorphism (RSD; females the larger sex), sex ratios biased in favor of...

Recently a market in options based on CPI inflation (inflation caps and floors) has emerged in the US. This paper uses quotes on these derivatives to construct probability densities for inflation. We study how these pdfs respond to news announcements, and find that the implied odds of deflation...