Kina - Paternity and social structure in small passerines of the Tibetan Plateau

The pre-project will lay the foundation for a larger research collaboration between the bird research group at Natural History Museum, UiO, and the research group of a chinese bird ecologist, Dr. Lu Xin at Wuhan University. Dr. Lu Xin has worked for sever al years with the breeding ecology and behaviour of various bird species at the Tibetan Plateau. He seeks collaboration with our laboratory at NHM for the analysis of genetic parentage and relatedness on his study species. Our research group has strong sc ientific interests in these analyses since we have a long research history on similar breeding systems of European and North American species, particularly in Arctic and alpine environments. Moreover, we have recently developed a new theory for understand ing the huge diversity of extrapair mating systems in passerine birds, that makes predictions about the genetic structure, mating preferences and costs of inbreeding. These predictions should ideally be tested on a novel set of species. A number of passer ine species breeding on the Tibetan Plateau would seem excellent candidates for such a test. The pre-project has five sub-goals: 1) a visit to the Chinese partner and the field site during summer 2006 to explore the possibilities for field projects on var ious species, 2) the development of suitable microsatellite DNA genotyping system for one candidate species, the ground tit, 3) Analyse patterns of paternity and relatedness in family groups of the ground tit, based on DNA material collected by the Chines e partner in 2005, 4) prepare a joint scientific manuscript on the analysis results from the ground tit, and 5) prepare a research grant proposal in 2007 for a bilateral project, including salaries for minimum one postdoc and one PhD student.