Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Scientific Reports
Publication Date
Summer 7-5-2016
Abstract
Studies on the evolution of parental care have focused primarily on the costs and benefits of parental care and the life-history attributes that favour it. However, once care evolves, offspring in some taxa appear to become increasingly dependent on their parents. Although offspring dependency is a central theme in family life, the evolutionary dynamics leading to it are not fully understood. Beetles of the genus Nicrophorus are well known for their elaborate biparental care, including provisioning of their young. By manipulating the occurrence of pre- or post-hatching care, we show that the offspring of three burying beetle species, N. orbicollis, N. pustulatus, and N. vespilloides, show striking variation in their reliance on parental care. Our results demonstrate that this variation within one genus arises through a differential dependency of larvae on parental feeding, but not on pre-hatching care. In N. pustulatus, larvae appear to be nutritionally independent of their parents, but in N. orbicollis, larvae do not survive in the absence of parental feeding. We consider evolutionary scenarios by which nutritional dependency may have evolved, highlighting the role of brood size regulation via infanticide in this genus.
Funding Source
The study was funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to SS (STE 1874/6-1) and a grant from the National Science Foundation (IOS-1118160) to SKS.
Recommended Citation
Capodeanu-Nägler, A., Keppner, E., Vogel, H. et al. From facultative to obligatory parental care: Interspecific variation in offspring dependency on post-hatching care in burying beetles. Sci Rep 6, 29323 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep29323
DOI
10.1038/srep29323
Comments
First published in Scientific Reports (2016): https://doi.org/10.1038/srep29323
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Supplementary: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fsrep29323/MediaObjects/41598_2016_BFsrep29323_MOESM1_ESM.pdf