ArticleEcology and evolution2013
The origin of parental care in relation to male and female life history.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Trade-offs in avian parental care: a review of theory and meta-analysis of brood size manipulations.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Pooled it
- The evolution of negotiation strategies diversifies parental cooperation.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Sexual selection and life history interact to influence the evolution of paternal care.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Sex differences in avian parental care patterns vary across the breeding cycle.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Transient polymorphisms in parental care strategies drive divergence of sex roles.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Life history and the evolutionary loss of parental care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Sex-specific aging in animals: Perspective and future directions.Aging cell · 2022Review
- Understanding the Loss of Maternal Care in Avian Brood Parasites Using Preoptic Area Transcriptome Comparisons in Brood Parasitic and Non-parasitic Blackbirds.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- Certainty of paternity in two coucal species with divergent sex roles: the devil takes the hindmost.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Surf and turf: predation by egg-eating snakes has led to the evolution of parental care in a terrestrial lizard.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Population-Level Density Dependence Influences the Origin and Maintenance of Parental Care.PloS one · 2016Article
- Transcriptomes of parents identify parenting strategies and sexual conflict in a subsocial beetle.Nature communications · 2015Article
- An experimental test on time constraint and sexual conflict over parental care.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
- The evolution of parental care in insects: A test of current hypotheses.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2015Article
- The sexual cascade and the rise of pre-ejaculatory (Darwinian) sexual selection, sex roles, and sexual conflict.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2014Review
- What are the benefits of parental care? The importance of parental effects on developmental rate.Ecology and evolution · 2014Article
- Sex differences in life history drive evolutionary transitions among maternal, paternal, and bi-parental care.Ecology and evolution · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of maternal, paternal, and bi-parental care has been the focus of a great deal of research. Males and females vary in basic life-history characteristics (e.g., stage-specific mortality, maturation) in ways that are unrelated to parental investment. Surprisingly, few studies have examined the effect of this variation in male and female life history on the evolution of care. Here, we use a theoretical approach to determine the sex-specific life-history characteristics that give rise to the origin of paternal, maternal, or bi-parental care from an ancestral state of no care. Females initially invest more into each egg than males. Despite this inherent difference between the sexes, paternal, maternal, and bi-parental care are equally likely when males and females are otherwise similar. Thus, sex differences in initial zygotic investment do not explain the origin of one pattern of care over another. However, sex differences in adult mortality, egg maturation rate, and juvenile survival affect the pattern of care that will be most likely to evolve. Maternal care is more likely if female adult mortality is high, whereas paternal care is more likely if male adult mortality is high. These findings suggest that basic life-history differences between the sexes can alone explain the origin of maternal, paternal, and bi-parental care. As a result, the influence of life-history characteristics should be considered as a baseline scenario in studies examining the origin of care.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.