ArticleeLife2015
Parental effects alter the adaptive value of an adult behavioural trait.
Article in eLife, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 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.
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.
- Studying adaptation at the invisible scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Gene body methylation evolves during the sustained loss of parental care in the burying beetle.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Transgenerational effects of grandparental and parental diets combine with early-life learning to shape adaptive foraging phenotypes in Amblyseius swirskii.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Evolutionary change in the construction of the nursery environment when parents are prevented from caring for their young directly.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- An evolutionary switch from sibling rivalry to sibling cooperation, caused by a sustained loss of parental care.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- The early-life environment and individual plasticity in life-history traits.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Adaptive evolution of synchronous egg-hatching in compensation for the loss of parental care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Superior stimulation of female fecundity by subordinate males provides a mechanism for telegony.Evolution letters · 2018Article
- Offspring genes indirectly influence sibling and maternal behavioural strategies over resource share.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Article
- Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle's carrion nest.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Article
- Interspecific interactions change the outcome of sexual conflict over prehatching parental investment in the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
- Maternal care shapes an aposematic display and provides lifelong protection against predators.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Social immunity of the family: parental contributions to a public good modulated by brood size.Evolutionary ecologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The parents' phenotype, or the environment they create for their young, can have long-lasting effects on their offspring, with profound evolutionary consequences. Yet, virtually no work has considered how such parental effects might change the adaptive value of behavioural traits expressed by offspring upon reaching adulthood. To address this problem, we combined experiments on burying beetles (Nicrophorus vespilloides) with theoretical modelling and focussed on one adult behavioural trait in particular: the supply of parental care. We manipulated the early-life environment and measured the fitness payoffs associated with the supply of parental care when larvae reached maturity. We found that (1) adults that received low levels of care as larvae were less successful at raising larger broods and suffered greater mortality as a result: they were low-quality parents. Furthermore, (2) high-quality males that raised offspring with low-quality females subsequently suffered greater mortality than brothers of equivalent quality, which reared larvae with higher quality females. Our analyses identify three general ways in which parental effects can change the adaptive value of an adult behavioural trait: by influencing the associated fitness benefits and costs; by consequently changing the evolutionary outcome of social interactions; and by modifying the evolutionarily stable expression of behavioural traits that are themselves parental effects.
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.