Arianna Dalzero

Arianna Dalzero is a behavioral ecologist affiliated as a Researcher and Guest at the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Her research focuses on the evolution of sociality and life-history implications, particularly parent-offspring relations and parental manipulation across species. She investigates how parental strategies affect offspring fitness using population models applied to human societies (e.g., Yanomamo and Dogon) and other taxa.

Her PhD project, supervised by Dr. Dieter Lukas, Dr. Mary Brooke McElreath, and Prof. Richard McElreath, develops methods to analyze marriage between cousins as a potential parental manipulation strategy. She aims to expand this framework to multiple human populations and conduct cross-species comparisons of behaviors like reproductive suppression and parental investment trade-offs.

A member of the Comparative Behavioral Ecology Group, her work bridges evolutionary theory, quantitative modeling, and empirical data to explain parental-offspring conflict dynamics. Her research emphasizes understanding how ecological and social factors shape parental strategies across diverse species.