Thermodynamic constraints and the evolution of parental provisioning in vertebrates

Madeleine Beekman, Michael Thompson and Marko Jusup

Behavioral Ecology, 2019, vol. 30, issue 3, 583-591

Abstract: Why is postnatal parental provisioning so rare in ectothermic vertebrates while prolonged parental care is almost ubiquitous in endotherms? We argue that the scarcity of postnatal parental care is a result of ectothermy itself. While almost all endothermic young require prolonged postnatal care due to thermal constraints, ectothermic physiology does not pose the same constraint. Most ectothermic young are thus independent from birth. Ectothermic mothers are better off investing in future reproductive events than to continue investing into independent young, because the cost of feeding young does not outweigh the benefits. Ectothermy further releases the constraint on offspring size resulting in offspring of ectothermic vertebrates often being much smaller than their parents. When parents and offspring differ greatly in size, both tend to specialize on different diets, making the feeding of young by much larger individuals not impossible, but less likely. Additionally, when the size difference between parents and offspring is significant, both are likely to live in different habitats. Such spatial segregation is also less conducive to the evolution of parental care. In those species where parents and offspring are not spatially separated and parental care does occur, it is mainly restricted to the guarding of eggs or juveniles; parents of very few species provide their offspring with food. We conclude that parental care beyond the guarding of eggs or young is much less likely to evolve in ectothermic vertebrates compared with endothermic vertebrates, unless there are exceptional circumstances that strongly select for parents to provide for their offspring.

Keywords: amphibians; dynamic energy budget theory; fish; life-history evolution; reptiles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arz025 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:30:y:2019:i:3:p:583-591.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().