Abstract
The sharing of the same food source among parents and offspring can be a driver of the evolution of family life and parental care. However, if all family members desire the same meal, competitive situations can arise, especially if resource depletion is likely. When food is shared for reproduction and the raising of offspring, parents have to decide whether they should invest in self‐maintenance or in their offspring and it is not entirely clear how these two strategies are balanced. In the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, parents care for their offspring either bi‐ or uniparentally at a vertebrate carcass as the sole food source. The question of whether biparental care in this species offers the offspring a better environment for development compared with uniparental care has been the subject of some debate. We tested the hypothesis that male contribution to biparental brood care has a beneficial effect on offspring fitness but that this effect can be masked because the male also feeds from the shared resource. We show that a mouse carcass prepared by two Nicrophorus beetles is lighter compared with a carcass prepared by a single female beetle at the start of larval hatching and provisioning. This difference in carcass mass can influence offspring fitness when food availability is limited, supporting our hypothesis. Our results provide new insights into the possible evolutionary pathway of biparental care in this species of burying beetles.
Highlights
Life together in family-like associations leads to a variety of conflicts, with the sexual conflict over the amount of parental care provided and the conflicts between parents and their offspring being two of the better known (Kilner & Hinde, 2012; Lessells, 2012; Trivers, 1974)
In the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, parents care for their offspring either bi- or uniparentally at a vertebrate carcass as the sole food source
Burying beetles of the species Nicrophorus vespilloides (Figure 1) represent a well-suited organism for investigating the relationship of food consumption from a shared resource, the caring for a brood and the way that this relationship might contribute to the evolution of biparental care
Summary
Life together in family-like associations leads to a variety of conflicts, with the sexual conflict over the amount of parental care provided and the conflicts between parents and their offspring being two of the better known (Kilner & Hinde, 2012; Lessells, 2012; Trivers, 1974). Burying beetles of the species Nicrophorus vespilloides (Figure 1) represent a well-suited organism for investigating the relationship of food consumption from a shared resource, the caring for a brood and the way that this relationship might contribute to the evolution of biparental care These beetles perform elaborate pre- and posthatching parental care to improve the survival and fitness of their offspring, with small vertebrate carcasses being the exclusive food source for both parents and offspring during the duration of reproduction (Eggert & Müller, 1997; Pukowski, 1933). To create scenarios of different resource availability and different intensities of food competition among the family members, we used two carcass sizes, namely large (22 g) and small (5 g), and kept the initial brood size on each carcass size constant Those studies that found equal brood success for uni- versus biparental care used mouse carcasses of approximately 10 g (Bartlett, 1988), 21 g (Smiseth et al, 2005), and 25 g (Müller et al, 1998). We expected uniparental females to gain less weight over the course of the breeding event than biparental males or females, as they are unable to share their parental workload and might have to invest more energy in parental care
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