Abstract
Parent-offspring communication remains an unresolved challenge for biologist. The difficulty of the challenge comes from the fact that it is a multifaceted problem with connections to life-history evolution, parent-offspring conflict, kin selection and signalling. Previous efforts mainly focused on modelling resource allocation at the expense of the dynamic interaction during a reproductive season. Here we present a two-stage model of begging where the first stage models the interaction between nestlings and parents within a nest and the second stage models the life-history trade-offs. We show in an asexual population that honest begging results in decreased variance of collected food between siblings, which leads to mean number of surviving offspring. Thus, honest begging can be seen as a special bet-hedging against informational uncertainty, which not just decreases the variance of fitness but also increases the arithmetic mean.
Highlights
Parent-offspring conflict stays in the spotlight of biological investigations [1,2,3,4]
Signalling was proposed as a solution to this problem [8,9,10,11]. These models argue that offspring solicitation must be costly, and this cost should remove conflict of interest between parent and offspring by moving the offspring’s optimal resource allocation into the position of the parental optimum [9,10,11]
We investigate a two-dimensional life history strategy (e.g. [17]) that includes both what an individual does at its juvenile and adult stage
Summary
Parent-offspring conflict stays in the spotlight of biological investigations [1,2,3,4]. Solicitation appears to be honest in general, as much as needier offspring beg more intensively [6]. Such honest begging is perplexing at first. If there is a conflict of interest between parent and offspring, offspring are expected to solicit more food than the parental optimum would be. Signalling was proposed as a solution to this problem [8,9,10,11] These models argue that offspring solicitation must be costly, and this cost should remove conflict of interest between parent and offspring by moving the offspring’s optimal resource allocation into the position of the parental optimum [9,10,11]
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