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Parental care is an advantageous reproductive behaviour as the fitness of the caregiver is increased through improving the chances of its offspring’s survival. Parental care occurs in a variety of teleost fishes. The body size of parental fish and the size of their brood can affect nest abandonment decisions, where compared to smaller fish with smaller broods, larger fish with larger broods typically invest more energy into reproductive events because they have less future reproductive potential. Though essential for basal and body maintenance functions, when glucocorticoid hormones (e.g., cortisol) are chronically elevated, as can occur during stress, fish may experience impairments in behaviour and immune function leading to compromised health and condition. Anthropogenic stressors during parental care can lead to elevated stress, therefore making it necessary to understand how stress influences an already challenging period. Using smallmouth bass as a model, a gradient of body sizes and experimentally manipulated brood size (i.e., reducing large broods and supplementing small broods) and cortisol levels (i.e., elevated via slow-release intraperitoneal cocoa butter implant containing cortisol versus controls), I tested the hypothesis that nest guarding male smallmouth bass reproductive success and parental care behaviours (i.e., aggression, nest-tending) are influenced by parental body size, brood size and cortisol level. Overall, there was a relationship between cortisol treatment and nest success in which larger fish exhibited lower success when cortisol levels were elevated. Brood size had a significant effect on fish tending behaviour, independent of cortisol level and body size. Lending partial support to my hypothesis, the results of this study indicate that guarding male smallmouth

The Influence of Exogenous Cortisol Manipulation on Parental Investment and Reproductive Success in Nest Guarding Male Smallmouth Bass