ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2009
Maternal effects in cooperative breeders: from hymenopterans to humans.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parturition Synchrony Index: A Method for Assessing Individual Parturition Synchrony Within a Group or Population.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Mothers in a cooperatively breeding bird increase investment per offspring at the pre-natal stage when they will have more help with post-natal care.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Egg-mediated maternal effects in a cooperatively breeding cichlid fish.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Egg components and offspring survival vary with group size and laying order in a cooperative breeder.Oecologia · 2023Article
- The role of maternal age, growth, and environment in shaping offspring performance in an aerial conifer seed bank.American journal of botany · 2022Article
- Prenatal environmental conditions underlie alternative reproductive tactics that drive the formation of a mixed-kin cooperative society.Science advances · 2022Article
- Who listens to mother? A whole-family perspective on the evolution of maternal hormone allocation.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Review
- Contrasting associations between nestling telomere length and pre and postnatal helpers' presence in a cooperatively breeding bird.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Maternal and cohort effects modulate offspring responses to multiple stressors.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The ventromedial hypothalamic circuitry and male alloparental behaviour in a socially monogamous rodent species.The European journal of neuroscience · 2019Article
- Article
- Experimentally induced increases in fecundity lead to greater nestling care in blue tits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The evolution of early-life effects on social behaviour-why should social adversity carry over to the future?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The development of individual differences in cooperative behaviour: maternal glucocorticoid hormones alter helping behaviour of offspring in wild meerkats.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Parental manipulation of offspring size in social groups: a test using paper wasps.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2019Article
- The neurobiological causes and effects of alloparenting.Developmental neurobiology · 2017Review
- The relationship between egg size and helper number in cooperative breeders: a meta-analysis across species.PeerJ · 2017Article
- Article
- When cooperation begets cooperation: the role of key individuals in galvanizing support.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Stable eusociality via maternal manipulation when resistance is costless.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The environment that an offspring experiences during its development can have lifelong consequences for its morphology, anatomy, physiology and behaviour that are strong enough to span generations. One aspect of an offspring's environment that can have particularly pronounced and long-lasting effects is that provided by its parent(s) (maternal effects). Some disciplines in biology have been quicker to appreciate maternal effects than others, and some organisms provide better model systems for understanding the causes and consequences of the maternal environment for ecology and evolution than others. One field in which maternal effects has been poorly represented, and yet is likely to represent a particularly fruitful area for research, is the field of cooperative breeding (i.e. systems where offspring are reared by carers in addition to parent(s)). Here, we attempt to illustrate the scope of cooperative breeding systems for maternal effects research and, conversely, highlight the importance of maternal effects research for understanding cooperative breeding systems. To this end, we first outline why mothers will commonly benefit from affecting the phenotype of their offspring in cooperative breeding systems, present potential strategies that mothers could employ in order to do so and offer predictions regarding the circumstances under which different types of maternal effects might be expected. Second, we highlight why a neglect of maternal strategies and the effects that they have on their offspring could lead to miscalculations of helper/worker fitness gains and a misunderstanding of the factors selecting for the evolution and maintenance of cooperative breeding. Finally, we introduce the possibility that maternal effects could have significant consequences for our understanding of both the evolutionary origins of cooperative breeding and the rise of social complexity in cooperative systems.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.