Abstract
How much to invest in parental care and by who remain puzzling questions fomented by a sexual conflict between parents. Negotiation that facilitates coordinated parental behaviour may be key to ease this costly conflict. However, understanding cooperation requires that the temporal and sex-specific variation in parental care, as well as its multivariate nature is considered. Using a biparental bird species and repeated sampling of behavioural activities throughout a major part of reproduction, we show a clear division of tasks between males and females in provisioning, brooding and foraging. Such behavioural specializations fade with increasing nestling age, which stimulates the degree of alternated feeding visits, as a recently promoted form of conditional cooperation. However, such cooperation is thought to benefit offspring development, which is not supported by our data. Thus, from a proximate point of view, conditional cooperation via alternation critically depends on the division of parental tasks, while the ultimate benefits have yet to be shown.
Highlights
IntroductionBiparental care is relatively rare but appears taxonomically widespread across a number of invertebrate (e.g. some species of isopods, wood roaches, wasps and beetles) and vertebrate species (e.g. 90% of all birds, 23% of fish and 5% of mammals)[1, 2]
Biparental care is relatively rare but appears taxonomically widespread across a number of invertebrate and vertebrate species (e.g. 90% of all birds, 23% of fish and 5% of mammals)[1, 2]
Alternated nest visits have been interpreted as a form of direct reciprocity[13] or conditional cooperation[9, 11], that may resolve the conflict over parental investment
Summary
Biparental care is relatively rare but appears taxonomically widespread across a number of invertebrate (e.g. some species of isopods, wood roaches, wasps and beetles) and vertebrate species (e.g. 90% of all birds, 23% of fish and 5% of mammals)[1, 2]. The above highlights that parental care is often (1) multidimensional, (2) sex-specific and (3) temporally variable, which may hamper any form of cooperation that relies on negotiation These aspects have largely been overlooked far and demand detailed study to improve our current fragmented understanding of parental cooperation. We hypothesize that both sexual task specialization and the expected temporal variation in parental care limit the coordination of a shared task like food provisioning. We related multiple aspects of parental investment and coordination with estimates of reproductive success Such estimates include offspring development and physiological condition and can be interpreted as the result of negotiated overall work load between parents. One of the main expectations is that, if parents coordinate their rate of provisioning via alternation, the overall degree[10] and temporal increase[7] of alternation should enhance reproductive success
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