ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
Paternal care and litter size coevolution in mammals.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Paternal behavior is controlled by preoptic Trpc5 neurons.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Transcriptomic analysis identifies CXCL12 as a novel candidate gene for litter size in rabbits.Animal bioscience · 2026Article
- Exposure to novel females increases fecundity in adult male prairie voles.Hormones and behavior · 2025Article
- Mating system and copulatory behavior of the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis).Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- The Disputable Costs of Sleeping.Biology · 2025Review
- No evidence for a signal in mammalian basal metabolic rate associated with a fossorial lifestyle.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evolutionary trade-offs between testes size and parenting in Neotropical glassfrogs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The effects of maternal care on the developmental transcriptome and metatranscriptome of a wild bee.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The double-edged functions of necroptosis.Cell death & disease · 2023Review
- Plasticity in parental behavior and vasopressin: responses to co-parenting, pup age, and an acute stressor are experience-dependent.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- An accessory prefrontal cortex-thalamus circuit sculpts maternal behavior in virgin female mice.The EMBO journal · 2022Article
- A milk-sharing economy allows placental mammals to overcome their metabolic limits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Plasticity of the paternal brain: Effects of fatherhood on neural structure and function.Developmental psychobiology · 2021Review
- Evolution of Reproductive Life History in Mammals and the Associated Change of Functional Constraints.Genes · 2021Article
- Is degree of sociality associated with reproductive senescence? A comparative analysis across birds and mammals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The diversity of maternal-age effects upon pre-adult survival across animal species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- What is resilience: an affiliative neuroscience approach.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2020Article
- The evolution of matrilineal social systems in fissiped carnivores.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The neural mechanisms and consequences of paternal caregiving.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2019Review
- Photoresponsiveness affects life history traits but not oxidative status in a seasonal rodent.Frontiers in zoology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biparental care of offspring occurs in diverse mammalian genera and is particularly common among species with socially monogamous mating systems. Despite numerous well-documented examples, however, the evolutionary causes and consequences of paternal care in mammals are not well understood. Here, we investigate the evolution of paternal care in relation to offspring production. Using comparative analyses to test for evidence of evolutionary associations between male care and life-history traits, we explore if biparental care is likely to have evolved because of the importance of male care to offspring survival, or if evolutionary increases in offspring production are likely to result from the evolution of biparental care. Overall, we find no evidence that paternal care has evolved in response to benefits of supporting females to rear particularly costly large offspring or litters. Rather, our findings suggest that increases in offspring production are more likely to follow the evolution of paternal care, specifically where males contribute depreciable investment such as provisioning young. Through coevolution with litter size, we conclude that paternal care in mammals is likely to play an important role in stabilizing monogamous mating systems and could ultimately promote the evolution of complex social behaviours.
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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.