Adopt, ignore, or kill? Male poison frogs adjust parental decisions according to their territorial status

Abstract

Systematic infanticide of unrelated young has been reported in several animal taxa. Particular attention has been given to carnivores and primates, where infanticide is a sexually selected strategy of males to gain increased access to female mating partners. Cannibals must ensure avoiding their own offspring and targeting only unrelated young. Therefore, decision rules are needed to mediate parental and cannibalistic behaviour. Here we show experimentally that male poison frogs adjust their parental responses – care or infanticide – towards unrelated clutches according to their territorial status. Male frogs followed the simple rule ‘care for any clutch’ inside their territory, but immediately switched to cannibalism when establishing a new territory. This demonstrates that simple cognitive rules can mediate complex behaviours such as parental care, and that care and cannibalism are antagonistically linked. Non-parental infanticide is mediated by territorial cues and presumably serves to prevent misdirected care in this poison frog. Our results thus prompt a re-consideration of evolutionary and causal aspects of parental decision making, by suggesting that selective infanticide of unrelated young may generally become adaptive when the risks and costs of misdirected care are high.