Hey all! I am studying parental care in Insects and I would lie to check the impact to treating care as a single trait VS investigating each type of care separately. I am trying to find relevant papers on Google Scholar, but it;s hard to break down the question in key words, so I wonder if any of you know of any relevant papers. Many thanks in advance!
"Parental care" does not exist in nature. It is a term coined by people to unite many different behaviour patterns that increase survivorship of offspring. These different behaviour patterns can have very different evolutionary origins.
What kind of study are we talking about? A phylogenetic approach with using parental care as a character(s)? In that case it might make quite some sense to treat them individually, unless you have good reason to assume those behaviours (and possibly associated structures) to be homologous.
Markus Grams, yes I am using a phylogeny and I want to check the impact of pooling all the traits that fall under "parental care" VS checking the effect of each trait individually and I am looking for similar/relevant papers but nothing has come up, no matter what search terms I use.
Can't help you much with finding similar papers. But you might want to check Richter 2017 for example as a paper explaining the "nature" of phylogenetic characters to be "transformational series". If that is not given (different parental care(s?) being parts of a transformational series, i.e. homologous), you have good reason to test both approaches (one "care" character VS several single ones).
Article Homology and synapomorphy-symplesiomorphy-neither synonymous...
In my work on the evolution of parental care diversity, I precisely argue that care should not be treated as a whole in comparative studies because different care behaviours and adaptations likely entail different costs and benefits, and we demonstrate this matters when investigating questions on the evolutionary origin and loss of care as well as life history evolution. See West & Capellini I (2016) and Furnerss and Capellini (2019) both in Nature Communications
Dear Loannis:
I sympathize with your second option: research each brood care behavior independently. I say this because in my research I have noticed that each one has a series of connotations that one does not presuppose in advance and they emerge as the investigation deepens. I am attaching 2 links of my observations that I hope will help. Most importantly, I quote some references that you might not know. A hug and the best of luck.
Luis
Sorry! I don't know how to attach links here, please send your e-mail to me.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maternal-care-other-behaviours-aleurodicus-juleikae-luis-valencia/?published=t
Parental care is an inborn behavioral strategy shown by some groups of animals. Such care might protect the offspring from predators, along with building nests, and feeding young ones. It also increases the survival rate of young ones and enhances fitness of offspring. As there is a great variation in animals, how parents care for offspring and the amount of resources invested by the parents for rearing them, it is different in each group of animal kingdom, such as insects (bees, wasps and ants), fish (mouth brooders), amphibians, birds (herring gull) and mammals (owl monkeys and tifi monkeys). Hence, it is better to study each type of care separately.
a single trait as Among primate species, the highest levels of male care found in New World monkeys are observed in Owl monkeys (Aotus azarai ) and Titi monkeys (Callicebus caligatus). In both of these species, males and females are monogamous, pair-bonded, and exhibit bi-parental care for their offspring
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