The effects of parental care on brood success and quality in the burying beetle <i>Nicrophorus investigator</i>
Abstract
Across all species, biparental care is an atypical and intriguing adaptation. Burying beetles, (Coleptera: Silphidae) exhibit a large range of biparental care to offspring, involving the upkeep of their sole food source, direct feeding to larvae, and protection of the brood from a wide variety of intruders. However, as previous studies have found, in some cases the presence of two parents in the brood chamber is actually detrimental to the brood overall. In this experiment, we observed the success and quality of Nicrophorus investigator broods raised with varying degrees of parental care in the hopes of determining a driver for the persistence of this biparental care behavior in the species. Contrary to the expected, it was observed that Nicrophorus investigator larvae are able to develop normally without parental care post-hatching, uniparental care is the most successful type of parental care for brood quality under laboratory conditions, and single males are equally good parents as single females.
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