Indirect cue of paternity uncertainty does not affect nest site selection or parental care in a Pacific toadfish

Bose, Aneesh P. H.; Houpt, Noah; Rawlins, Madeline; Miller, Jessica S.; Juanes, Francis; Balshine, Sigal

doi:10.1007/s00265-020-2803-8

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…male scissortail sergeant; Manica, 2004). However, such cues are not generalisable across species; indeed, the presentation of single cuckolders has been shown to be ineffective in some species where they each pose little paternity threat on average (Svensson & Kvarnemo, 2007; Bose et al ., 2020). Therefore, while the brood parentage hypothesis holds promise, it would be beneficial for future studies to make a priori predictions about the strength of covariation that can be expected between parental investment and brood parentage in their study systems.…”

Section: Adaptive Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parent–offspring cannibalism throughout the animal kingdom: a review of adaptive hypotheses

Bose

2022

Biological Reviews

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Parents that kill and consume their offspring often appear to be acting against their own reproductive interests. Yet parentoffspring cannibalism is common and taxonomically widespread across the animal kingdom. In this review, I provide an overview of our current understanding of parent-offspring cannibalism, which has seen a proliferation in adaptive hypotheses over the past 20 years for why parents consume their own young. I review over four decades of research into this perplexing behaviour, drawing from work conducted on fishes, reptiles, insects, birds, and mammals among other taxa. Many factors have been hypothesised to explain parent-offspring cannibalism in nature, including poor parental energy reserves, small or large brood sizes, low or uncertain parentage, and high brood densities, and additional factors are still being uncovered. Parent-offspring cannibalism does not appear to have a single predominant explanation; rather, the factor, or set of factors, that govern its expression is largely taxon specific. Parents may either consume all offspring under their care (fullbrood cannibalism) or consume a fraction of their offspring (partial brood cannibalism). These forms of cannibalism are thought to provide adaptive benefits to cannibals under a range of circumstances, primarily by allowing parents to allocate parental efforts more optimallyenergy from eating (some of) one's current offspring can be redirected to other offspring, or to parental growth, survival, and ultimately to other future reproductive endeavours. Thus, parent-offspring cannibalism is a phenotypically plastic trait that responds to changing environmental, social, and physiological conditions. The expression of parent-offspring cannibalism in any given system is intimately linked to the reproductive value of current young relative to parents' expectations for future reproduction, and also to whether parental care is predominantly depreciable or non-depreciable. Furthermore, parent-offspring cannibalism has the potential to generate conflict between the sexes, and I briefly discuss some consequences of this conflict on patterns of mate choice. Finally, there still remain many aspects of this behaviour where our understanding is poor, and I highlight these topics to help guide future research.

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Section: Adaptive Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parent–offspring cannibalism throughout the animal kingdom: a review of adaptive hypotheses

Bose

2022

Biological Reviews

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“…The information conveyed by the visual detection of two sneakers, not interfering with spawning, may be under the threshold to trigger the differential cannibalism among nest areas. Similarly, in the plainfin midshipman fish, Porichthys notatus 19 , the presence of a sneaker does not affect neither the intensity of parental care over the offspring nor the nest choice of territorial males 65 . By contrast, in a small Sulawesi fish, Telmatherina sarasinorum, where only the 12% of spawning events are cuckolded, the occurrence of one sneaker increases threefold the egg cannibalism 16 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Spatial asymmetry of the paternity success in nests of a fish with alternative reproductive tactics

Poli

Marino

Santon

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Guard-sneaker tactics are widespread among fish, where territorial males defend a nest and provide parental care while sneakers try to steal fertilizations. Territorials and sneakers adopt diverse pre- and post-mating strategies, adjusting their ejaculate investment and/or behavioural responses to the presence of competitors. The relative distance of competitors from the spawning female plays a major role in influencing male mating strategies and the resulting paternity share. However, territorial male quality and sneaking intensity do not fully account for the variability in the relative siring success occurring among species. An often neglected factor potentially affecting sneakers proximity to females is the nest structure. We conducted a field experiment using the black goby, whose nests show two openings of different size. We found that territorial males defend more and sneaking pressure is higher at the front, larger access of the nest than at the back, smaller one. Moreover, microsatellite paternity analysis shows that territorials sire more offspring at the back of their nest. Such a predictable spatial distribution of the paternity share suggests that nest structure might work as an indirect cue of male relative siring success, potentially influencing the territorial male investment in parental care and/or the female egg deposition strategy.

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“…However, when the cost of caring is high, and the expected level of paternity is low, selection is expected to favour more suspicious males that reduce their paternal investment with increased risk of extra-pair mating [ 16 , 64 – 68 ]. Nevertheless, in some organisms, paternal care has been observed even in these cases [ 13 , 14 , 69 ]. We propose that microbial evolutionary benefits could contribute to the maintenance of paternal care.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of paternal care: a role for microbes?

Gurevich

Lewin‐Epstein

Hadany

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Paternal care, particularly in cases of uncertain paternity, carries significant costs. Extensive research, both theoretical and experimental, has explored the conditions in which paternal care behaviour would be favoured. Common explanations include an adjustment of care with uncertainty in paternity and limited accuracy in parentage assessment. Here, we propose a new explanation that microbes may play a role in the evolution of paternal care among their hosts. Using computational models, we demonstrate that microbes associated with increased paternal care could be favoured by natural selection. We find that microbe-induced paternal care could evolve under wider conditions than suggested by genetic models. Moreover, we show that microbe-induced paternal care is more likely to evolve when considering paternal care interactions that increase microbial transmission, such as feeding and grooming. Our results imply that factors affecting the composition of host microbiome may also alter paternal behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The role of the microbiome in host evolution’.

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Indirect cue of paternity uncertainty does not affect nest site selection or parental care in a Pacific toadfish

Cited by 4 publications

References 51 publications

Parent–offspring cannibalism throughout the animal kingdom: a review of adaptive hypotheses

Parent–offspring cannibalism throughout the animal kingdom: a review of adaptive hypotheses

Spatial asymmetry of the paternity success in nests of a fish with alternative reproductive tactics

The evolution of paternal care: a role for microbes?

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