Competition as a driver of eco-evolutionary dynamics: Linking individual aggression and environmental quality to reproductive performance - A project plan

Aggression is expressed during intraspecific competition over finite resources (food, territories, mates)essential for survival and reproduction. Aggression likely increases individuals’ resource-holding potential.However, there are still knowledge gaps in our understanding of the trade-offs governing the eco-evolutionary causes and consequences of aggressive behaviour. Given that natural environments are typically heterogeneous, with high and low-quality patches in terms of their resources, correlations are expected between the competitiveness of individual phenotypes that may be related to their aggressiveness, and the quality of their breeding environments. Such phenotype–environment correlations may challenge the partitioning of phenotypic and environmental contributions to among-individual variation in fitness (reproductive performance) and drive the dynamics of dispersal and settlement within population. In this PhD project, we will investigate the combined effects of phenotype(aggression) and environmental quality in driving dispersal, settlement and fitness using a long-term individual-based population study of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). The study has four main objectives:(1) Testing for phenotype–environment correlation between aggression and territory quality; (2)Assessing the role of individual aggression in mate selection and the fitness consequences for each sex;(3) Documenting the links between individual aggression, environmental quality and breeding dispersal;(4) Providing a meta-analysis on the trade-off between resource acquisition and resource utilization.