My primary interests focus on identifying the ecological factors that have promoted the evolution of interesting and unusual behaviors in animals, particularly behaviors related to parental care and mating systems. We address questions about how the differences in ecological constraints experienced intraspecifically and interspecifically impact the manifestation of the parental care behaviors that evolve, and, ultimately, offspring success. We also try to use that information as well as variation in physical features assessed by scanning electron microscopy and collaborative efforts that examine factors at the molecular level to interpret the value of different parenting strategies and to sort out phylogenetic relationships.