ArticleScientific reports2016
Surf and turf: predation by egg-eating snakes has led to the evolution of parental care in a terrestrial lizard.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Delayed hatching as a life-history response to intraguild predation: interspecific variation in predatory mites.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Flexible parental care in a songbird correlates with sex-specific responses to seasonal phenology, mating opportunity and reproductive success.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Live birth in lizards: A process-based model for the roles of temperature, behavior, and life-history.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- The evolution of negotiation strategies diversifies parental cooperation.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Snowmelt and laying date impact the parental care strategy of a high-Arctic shorebird.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Loss of sea turtle eggs drives the collapse of an insular reptile community.Science advances · 2023Article
- Female-female aggression in the Gila monster (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The reproductive ecology drivers of egg attendance in amphibians.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Terrestrial reproduction and parental care drive rapid evolution in the trade-off between offspring size and number across amphibians.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Sum of fears among intraguild predators drives the survival of green sea turtle (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Pain in dinosaurs: what is the evidence?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Coevolution influences the evolution of filial cannibalism, offspring abandonment and parental care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- When males live longer: Resource-driven territorial behavior drives sex-specific survival in snakes.Science advances · 2019Article
- To flee or wait and see? Response of incubating white-browed scrubwrens to information about danger.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animals display a great diversity of parental care tactics that ultimately enhance offspring survival, but how such behaviors evolve remains unknown for most systems. Here, we studied the evolution of maternal care, in the form of nest guarding, in a single population of long-tailed sun skink (Eutropis longicaudata) living on Orchid Island (Taiwan). This species typically does not provide protection to its offspring. Using a common garden experiment, we show that maternal care is genetically determined in this population. Through field manipulations, we demonstrate that care provides a significant increase in egg survival on Orchid Island by reducing predation from egg-eating snakes (Oligodon formosanus); this predator is not abundant in other populations of the lizard, which do not display parental care. Finally, using extensive field surveys, we show that the seasonal availability of green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) nests is the cause for the high abundance of snake predators on Orchid Island, with the snakes consuming lizard eggs when green turtle eggs are not available. Together, these lines of evidence provide the first full demonstration of how predation can trigger the evolution of parental care in a species derived from a non-caring ancestor.
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