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Pre-social benefits of extended parental care

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 08:31 authored by Jeremy Field, Selina Brace
The evolution of helping, in which some individuals forfeit their own reproduction and help others to reproduce, is a central problem in evolutionary biology. Recently proposed insurance-based mechanisms rely on a pre-existing life history with a long period of offspring dependency relative to the short life expectancies of adult carers1, 2, 3, 4: a lone mother's offspring are doomed if she dies young, whereas after a helper dies, other group members can finish rearing the offspring5, 6. A critical question, however, is how this life history could evolve in ancestral non-social populations, as offspring survival would then depend on a single, short-lived carer. Here, we resolve this paradox by focusing on the extended parental care inherent in prolonged dependency. We show experimentally that in non-social wasps, extended care can significantly reduce the impact of interspecific parasites. Under extended care, offspring are less vulnerable by the time they are exposed to parasites, and costs of parasitism are reduced because mothers have the option to terminate investment in failing offspring. By experimentally simulating aspects of extended care in a species where it is lacking, we demonstrate that neither benefit requires specialized behaviour. Such benefits could therefore offset the disadvantage of prolonged dependency in non-social species, thereby facilitating the evolution of helping.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Nature

ISSN

0028-0836

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Volume

428

Page range

650-652

Pages

3.0

Department affiliated with

  • Evolution, Behaviour and Environment Publications

Notes

The first study to show how the life-history equired to favour the evolution of helping could itself have evolved in non-social ancestral taxa. I devised the experiments, carried out all of the work (myself or jointly with undergraduate co-author), carried out the statistical anaysis and wrote the paper.

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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