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Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.

ABSTRACT: Males and females are defined by the relative size of their gametes (anisogamy), but secondary sexual dimorphism in fertilization, parental investment and mating competition is widespread and often remarkably stable over evolutionary timescales. Recent theory has clarified the causal connections between anisogamy and the most prevalent differences between the sexes, but deviations from these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we study how sex differences in parental investment and mating competition coevolve with parental care specialization. Parental investment often consists of two or more distinct activities (e.g. provisioning and defence) and parents may care more efficiently by specializing in a subset of these activities. Our model predicts that efficient care specialization broadens the conditions under which biparental investment can evolve in lineages that historically had uniparental care. Major transitions in sex roles (e.g. from female-biased care with strong male mating competition to male-biased care with strong female competition) can arise following ecologically induced changes in the costs or benefits of different care types, or in the sex ratio at maturation. Our model provides a clear evolutionary mechanism for sex-role transitions, but also predicts that such transitions should be rare. It consequently contributes towards explaining widespread phylogenetic inertia in parenting and mating systems.

SUBMITTER: Henshaw JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6732396 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.

Henshaw Jonathan M JM Fromhage Lutz L Jones Adam G AG

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20190828 1909

Males and females are defined by the relative size of their gametes (anisogamy), but secondary sexual dimorphism in fertilization, parental investment and mating competition is widespread and often remarkably stable over evolutionary timescales. Recent theory has clarified the causal connections between anisogamy and the most prevalent differences between the sexes, but deviations from these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we study how sex differences in parental investment and mating c ...[more]

PMID: 31455191

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Project description:The decision to provide parental care is often associated with trade-offs, because resources allocated to parental care typically cannot be invested in self-maintenance or mating. In most animals, females provide more parental care than males, but the reason for this pattern is still debated in evolutionary ecology. To better understand sex differences in parental care and its consequences, we need to study closely related species where the sexes differ in offspring care. We investigated parental care in relation to offspring growth in two closely related coucal species that fundamentally differ in sex roles and parental care, but live in the same food-rich habitat with a benign climate and have a similar breeding phenology. Incubation patterns differed and uniparental male black coucals fed their offspring two times more often than female and male white-browed coucals combined. Also, white-browed coucals had more 'off-times' than male black coucals, during which they perched and preened. However, these differences in parental care were not reflected in offspring growth, probably because white-browed coucals fed their nestlings a larger proportion of frogs than insects. A food-rich habitat with a benign climate may be a necessary, but-perhaps unsurprisingly-is not a sufficient factor for the evolution of uniparental care. In combination with previous results (Goymann et al. 2015 J. Evol. Biol. 28, 1335-1353 (doi:10.1111/jeb.12657)), these data suggest that white-browed coucals may cooperate in parental care, because they lack opportunities to become polygamous rather than because both parents were needed to successfully raise all offspring. Our case study supports recent theory suggesting that permissive environmental conditions in combination with a particular life history may induce sexual selection in females. A positive feedback loop among sexual selection, body size and adult sex-ratio may then stabilize reversed sex roles in competition and parental care.

Dataset Information

Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.

Publications

Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.

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