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RESEARCH INTEREST The frame work It is well known that within species consistent differences in behaviour among individuals exist, and nowadays, personalities are recently recognized in many animal species. This individual variation in behaviour is intriguing, since in its simple form directional evolutionary selection for the best adapted individual should eliminate such variation. An obvious possibility is that the origin of individual differences lies in early ontogeny. Notwithstanding the great importance of genetic variation, environmental factors appear to exert an influence on behavioural development that is often much more important and subtle than assumed. Therefore, studying behavioural development is important, because it yields insight into the flexibility of developmental trajectories, and in the mechanisms and function of (pathologies) in adult behaviour. Clearly, individual variation in behaviour is not just noise but can reveal important biological variation. Development starts already in utero or in the egg. The importance of prenatal factors on development has long been underestimated (out of sight, out of mind) but is now increasingly acknowledged as having important organizing effects on brain and behaviour. One of these factors are steroid hormones. In many animal taxa, embryos are not only exposed to hormones that they produce themselves, but also to hormones from their mother. This is intriguing, since it is well known that prenatal exposure to steroid hormones can have profound long time organizing effects on the phenotype, such as on sexual differentiation. The embryonic exposure to maternal hormones is, at least partly, a function of the hormonal status of the mother, which is in turn depending on environmental conditions. This opens the fascinating possibility that mothers translate the environmental conditions to their young via the transfer of their hormones. In this way the mother can anticipate the conditions in which the young will be reared, and adjust their development accordingly. The transfer of maternal hormones to the embryo is a form of non-genetic inheritance that provides the mother with a flexible tool to maximize her Darwinian fitness, in addition to genetic inheritance. These hormone mediated maternal effects are currently an important line of my research. We study the effects of the interplay between environment and hormones on early development both in the prenatal and the early postnatal phase. We focus not only on the development of personality, but also on lateralization of brain and behaviour. This lateralization, in which each of the hemispheres of the brain is specialized for certain tasks, is a fundamental aspect of the organization of brain and behaviour in vertebrates, affecting perception, emotion, cognition and motor behaviour. Our work has also applied aspects, for example for improving animal welfare in the commercial animal breeding industry, where housing conditions in one generation may affect later generations but such maternal effects are as yet hardly addressed. The field of developmental behavioural endocrinology is an excellent field for integrating mechanistic and functional / evolutionary approaches. Over the past thirty years, the physiological and ecological approaches to behaviour have grown apart. It is my belief that for progress in both fields these two different approaches should be integrated. For the understanding of the function and evolution of behaviour we need to understand the physiological regulation mechanisms that underlie behaviour, in order to understand how flexible the phenotype is, and where evolutionary selection can act or is constrained. Vice versa, the study of causal mechanisms of behaviour should be inspired by knowledge of which problems are faced by the animal in the natural condition, and how these should be solved in order to increase its survival and reproductive success. This integration requires integration of lab and field studies. In addition, I am convinced that the use of a diversity of animal models, in addition to the laboratory mouse or rat, can yield important new insights into the regulation and function of behaviour. The study of hormone-mediated maternal effects provides excellent opportunities for such approaches. These effects exist in a wide array of animal taxa, and we use both fish, birds and mammals, including humans. It concerns the study of physiological mechanisms within a clear functional and evolutionary context. Furthermore, hormones have many pleiotrophic effects, and are probably important regulators of so called trade-off’s, a key concept in evolutionary biology. Therefore my collaborations span the wide array from neuroendocrinologists to behavioural ecologists. Experimental testing of hypotheses, generated by descriptive studies under natural conditions, is indispensable for scientific progress. To test experimentally the effect of prenatal exposure to maternal steroids on development, avian species are much more suitable than mammalian species, since in the former the embryo develops outside the mother’s body, easy assessable for measurement and manipulation. In addition, avian species are classical models for the study of behavioural ecology, and well suited for developmental studies under artificial conditions because of the possibility to rear the animals by hand. This renders these species ideal to integrate mechanistic (proximate) and functional/evolutionary (ultimate) approached to behavioural development. We recently moved to a new building with state of the art facilities: almost 150 modern outdoor aviaries for birds and rodents and of different sizes, including very large ones; indoor facilities for keeping a wide array of species, climate rooms, surgery rooms, endocrinology and DNA labs etc. (see the website of the group and the institute). A large crew of animal caretakers is available, as well as several lab technicians