Abstract
Parental care systems are shaped by costs and benefits to each sex of investing into current versus future progeny. Flexible compensatory parental care is mainly known in biparental species, particularly where parental desertion or reduction of care by 1 parent is common. The other parent can then compensate this loss by either switching parental roles and/or by increasing its own parental effort. In uniparental species, desertion of the caregiver usually leads to total brood loss. In the poison frog, Allobates femoralis, obligatory tadpole transport (TT) is generally performed by males, whereas females abandon their clutches after oviposition. Nevertheless, in a natural population we previously observed 7.8% of TT performed by females, which we could link to the absence of the respective fathers. In the following experiment, under laboratory conditions, all tested A. femoralis females flexibly took over parental duties, but only when their mates were removed. Our findings provide clear evidence for compensatory flexibility in a species with unisexual parental care. Contrary to the view of amphibian parental care as being stereotypical and fixed, these results demonstrate behavioral flexibility as an adaptive response to environmental and social uncertainty. Behavioral flexibility might actually represent a crucial step in the evolutionary transition from uniparental to biparental care in poison frogs. We suspect that across animal species flexible parental roles are much more common than previously thought and suggest the idea of a 3-dimensional continuum regarding flexibility, parental involvement, and timing, when thinking about the evolution of parental care.
Highlights
In species, where one or both parents provide care for their offspring, the actual parental investment of both sexes is shaped by the trade-off between current and future mating opportunities (Trivers 1972)
Male and female A. femoralis showed behavior similar to prior observations in the field: males called from elevated positions; as soon as a female was close, her presence elicited courtship calls and initiated courting behavior; and clutches were deposited in the leaf litter
Our findings provide clear evidence for compensatory flexibility in a uniparental species with generally fixed sex-specific parental
Summary
In species, where one or both parents provide care for their offspring, the actual parental investment of both sexes is shaped by the trade-off between current and future mating opportunities (Trivers 1972). Insects and birds, it has been shown that experimentally widowed parents are capable of raising offspring alone, either by increasing their usual parental activities or by altering their parental behavior (Itzkowitz et al 2001; Harrison et al 2009; Suzuki and Nagano 2009). These studies corroborate theoretical models suggesting that the roles displayed in biparental species may be flexible and depend on the presence and the behavior of the other parent. Many studies of parental care have investigated variation in the behavior of entire populations across environments, whereas little is known about behavioral flexibility within individuals (Royle et al 2014)
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