Male parental care in insects

Abstract

Parental care is traditionally defined as costly behaviour by parents that increase the fitness of offspring. It may be uniparental, biparental or alloparental. In uniparental care, paternity assurance is usually repeated for copulation just before oviposition. Biparental care is favoured when sexual selection is not intense and when the adult sex ratio of males to females is not strongly skewed. Alloparental care is a seemingly altruistic and reproductively costly behaviour observed in over 120 mammalians and 150 avian species. Male parental care evolved exclusively from no care. Supporting models like the “enhanced fecundity model” and “overlapping brood model” hypothesize that male care is favoured because females do avoid care of their offspring. Biparental care largely arose by males joining caring females and was more labile in Holometabola than in Hemimetabola. Paternal care can be maintained under sexual selection which helps caring males to attract more mates.