Search results for "Offspring"

2019

Parents can influence offspring dispersal through breeding site selection, competition, or by directly moving their offspring during parental care. Many animals move their young, but the potential role of this behavior in dispersal has rarely been investigated. Neotropical poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) are well known for shuttling their tadpoles from land to water, but the associated movements have rarely been quantified and the potential function of tadpole transport in dispersal has not been addressed. We used miniature radio-transmitters to track the movements of two poison frog species during tadpole transport, and surveyed pool availability in the study area. We found that parental male…

No Evidence for Enforced Alloparental Care in a Cooperatively Breeding Parrot

2016

In cooperatively breeding species, in which non-breeding helpers assist in rearing the offspring of breeding individuals, conflicts of interest commonly occur between breeders and helpers over their respective contributions to offspring care. During such conflicts, breeders might use aggressive behavior to enforce contributions of helpers to offspring care, especially if helpers are not related to the breeders and their offspring and thus do not stand to gain indirect fitness benefits by helping. Using a combination of behavioral and genetic data, we investigated in the cooperatively breeding El Oro parakeet Pyrrhura orcesi (i) whether breeders are commonly dominant over helpers, (ii) wheth…

Extended winters entail long-term costs for insect offspring reared in an overwinter burrow

2018

International audience; Winter imposes an ecological challenge to animals living in colder climates, especially if these adverse conditions coincide with reproduction and offspring rearing. To overcome this challenge, some insects burrow in the soil to protect adults, larvae, or eggs from negative effects of winter. However, whether this protection is effective against any long-term consequences of changes in winter duration is unclear. Here, we investigated the long-term effects of winter length variation on eggs of the European earwig Forficula auricularia. In this insect, females construct and maintain a burrow between late autumn and spring, in which they provide extensive forms of care…

Borrelia afzeliialters reproductive success in a rodent host

2018

The impact of a pathogen on the fitness and behaviour of its natural host depends upon the host–parasite relationship in a given set of environmental conditions. Here, we experimentally investigated the effects ofBorrelia afzelii,one of the aetiological agents of Lyme disease in humans, on the fitness of its natural rodent host, the bank vole (Myodes glareolus), in semi-natural conditions with two contrasting host population densities. Our results show thatB. afzeliican modify the reproductive success and spacing behaviour of its rodent host, whereas host survival was not affected. Infection impaired the breeding probability of large bank voles. Reproduction was hastened in infected females…

Aging parasites produce offspring with poor fitness prospects.

2017

Senescing individuals have poor survival prospects and low fecundity. They can also produce offspring with reduced survival and reproductive success. We tested the effect of parental age on the performance of descendants in the nematode Heligmosomoides polygyrus , an intestinal parasite of rodents. We found that offspring of senescing worms had reduced within-host survival and reduced egg shedding over the first month post-infection compared with offspring produced by young parents. These results suggest that declining offspring quality is a component of senescence in parasitic nematodes and might have evolutionary consequences for the optimal schedule of age-dependent investment into repr…

Maternal condition determines offspring behavior toward family members in the European earwig

2015

International audience; Parental care confers benefits to juveniles but is usually associated with substantial costs for parents. These costs often depend on parental condition, which is thus considered as a key determinant of the level of parental care expressed during family life. However, how parental condition affects the behaviors that juveniles express toward their siblings and parents remains poorly explored. Here, we investigated these questions in the European earwig Forficula auricularia, an insect in which mothers provide extensive forms of care to their juveniles. We measured maternal body condition at egg hatching, subsequently manipulated maternal nutritional state, and finall…

Viability, behavior, and color expression in the offspring of matings between common wall lizard Podarcis muralis color morphs

2021

Abstract Color polymorphisms are widely studied to identify the mechanisms responsible for the origin and maintenance of phenotypic variability in nature. Two of the mechanisms of balancing selection currently thought to explain the long-term persistence of polymorphisms are the evolution of alternative phenotypic optima through correlational selection on suites of traits including color and heterosis. Both of these mechanisms can generate differences in offspring viability and fitness arising from different morph combinations. Here, we examined the effect of parental morph combination on fertilization success, embryonic viability, newborn quality, antipredator, and foraging behavior, as we…

Embryonic survival and larval predator-avoidance ability in mutually ornamented whitefish

2011

Mutual ornamentation (i.e. the expression of secondary sexual characters) in both sexes is a relatively common but rarely studied phenomenon in the animal kingdom. In the present study, we investigated whether mutual ornamentation is indicative of offspring embryonic survival and predator-avoidance ability in whitefish. We crossed ten randomly selected females and ten randomly selected males in all possible combinations resulting in 100 sib groups, and hypothesized that fitness (measured as offspring survival) of elaborately ornamented parents would be higher in both sexes of whitefish. Parental effects were found in both studied traits: effects of female and female–male interaction were si…

Parental care shapes evolution of aposematism and provides lifelong protection against predators

2019

ABSTRACTSocial interactions within species can modulate the response to selection and determine the extent of evolutionary change. Yet relatively little work has determined whether the social environment can influence the evolution of traits that are selected by interactions with other species - a major source of natural selection. Here we show that the amount of parental care received as an offspring can influence the expression, and potential evolution, of warning displays deployed against predators in adulthood. In theory, warning displays by prey are selected by predators for uniformity and to reliably advertise the extent to which individuals are chemically defended. However, the corre…

Maternal effects on offspring Igs and egg size in relation to natural and experimentally improved food supply

2008

1. Maternal effects have been suggested to function as a mechanism for transgenerational plasticity, in which the environment experienced by the mother is translated into the phenotype of the offspring. In birds and other oviparous vertebrates where early development is within the egg, mothers may be able to improve the viability prospects of their offspring at hatching by priming eggs with immunological and nutritional components. 2. We studied how resource availability affects maternal investment in offspring by feeding Ural owl (Strix uralensis, Pall.) females prior to egg-laying in 3 years of dramatically different natural food conditions. 3. Supplementary feeding prior to laying increa…