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How Hormonal Factors Affect The Behaviors Within The Parent Offspring Conflict Essay

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Hormonal factors
Hormonal factors have a strong influence on the behaviors within the parent-offspring conflict, especially within the realm of begging. This factor is important because of the mother’s ability to change the hormonal contact that the offspring will receive within development or within the egg. The hormonal factors that will be discussed are the different levels of testosterone, other androgens influences, parental influence on yolk hormones, and differences in male and female yolk androgens.
There is considerable evidence indicated that testosterone can be involved in different levels of effort in begging. In a research article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, the higher the testosterone the more begging behavior is observed and the increase of resource success from the parents. This could show that there is a potential trade-off in testosterone-mediated begging behavior. It could also indicate that the endocrine system has some control over this offspring behavior and therefore begging could be part of the honest signaling models, reflecting the need of the offspring honestly. In such a case, the parent-offspring conflict is lessened by the honesty of the offsprings signal, benefiting the parent’s fitness as well as the offspring’s fitness (Goodship, 2011).
Androgens are involved in the environmental plasticity of begging in both the parent and the offspring. These interactions probably occur within the egg,
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