ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2015
Comparative support for the expensive tissue hypothesis: Big brains are correlated with smaller gut and greater parental investment in Lake Tanganyika cichlids.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Elevational Variation in Organ Size and Brain-Viscera Energetic Trade-Offs in the Minshan Toad (Biology · 2026Article
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- Companion animals support human wellbeing and health: evolutionary, behavioral and physiological contexts.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Parental investment and body temperature explain encephalization in vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- State-behaviour feedbacks between boldness and food intake shape escape responses in fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Evolution of Plasticity in Brain Morphology.Brain, behavior and evolution · 2025Review
- Evolution of neural circuitry and cognition.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Testing the expensive-tissue hypothesis' prediction of inter-tissue competition using causal modelling with latent variables.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion.Communications biology · 2023Review
- Wolf-Dog-Human: Companionship Based on Common Social Tools.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Temperature, species identity and morphological traits predict carbonate excretion and mineralogy in tropical reef fishes.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Parental provisioning drives brain size in birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Large and expensive brain comes with a short lifespan: The relationship between brain size and longevity among fish taxa.Journal of fish biology · 2022Article
- The expensive-tissue hypothesis may help explain brain-size reduction during domestication.Communicative & integrative biology · 2022Review
- Understanding fish cognition: a review and appraisal of current practices.Animal cognition · 2021Review
- Testing hypotheses of marsupial brain size variation using phylogenetic multiple imputations and a Bayesian comparative framework.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Interactions with conspecific outsiders as drivers of cognitive evolution.Nature communications · 2020Review
- Large brains, short life: selection on brain size impacts intrinsic lifespan.Biology letters · 2019Article
- Phylogenomics uncovers early hybridization and adaptive loci shaping the radiation of Lake Tanganyika cichlid fishes.Nature communications · 2018Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
The brain is one of the most energetically expensive organs in the vertebrate body. Consequently, the energetic requirements of encephalization are suggested to impose considerable constraints on brain size evolution. Three main hypotheses concerning how energetic constraints might affect brain evolution predict covariation between brain investment and (1) investment into other costly tissues, (2) overall metabolic rate, and (3) reproductive investment. To date, these hypotheses have mainly been tested in homeothermic animals and the existing data are inconclusive. However, there are good reasons to believe that energetic limitations might play a role in large-scale patterns of brain size evolution also in ectothermic vertebrates. Here, we test these hypotheses in a group of ectothermic vertebrates, the Lake Tanganyika cichlid fishes. After controlling for the effect of shared ancestry and confounding ecological variables, we find a negative association between brain size and gut size. Furthermore, we find that the evolution of a larger brain is accompanied by increased reproductive investment into egg size and parental care. Our results indicate that the energetic costs of encephalization may be an important general factor involved in the evolution of brain size also in ectothermic vertebrates.
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