Reproductive Success and Parental Care of Nicrophorus investigator.

Abstract

For years the standard of care in burying beetles has been a male and female, bi- parental care, but is it really? The intent of this experiment was to measure the success of burying beetle larvae produced under four different parental conditions after carcass preparation; 50 pairs of Nicrophorus investigator were collected from the wild and randomly assigned treatments of both parents, solo female, solo male, and neither parent, imposed the day that larvae hatched. The time it took for each stage of development was recorded. Once the larvae reached the last instar and consumed the carcass they were counted and weighed. The traditional pair of male and female parents was predicted to lead to the best larval growth (total brood mass, average larval mass, and larval number. The larvae without parents were not predicted to survive, and the uniparental (male or female parent only) were predicted to fall in between. The results found that broods with parents (at least one) did better than broods without attending adults (broods raised by solo females were just as successful as broods raised with both parents, and male and no parents were the poorest. Solo male parents produced significantly smaller broods, and broods without parents were able to survive without parental feeding. These results can give us more insight to the different behavior of male and female burying beetles.

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