ArticleScientific reports2017
Adopt, ignore, or kill? Male poison frogs adjust parental decisions according to their territorial status.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. 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.
- To eat or to care? Factors shaping parental or infanticidal behaviours in male poison frogs during territory takeover.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Infanticide is driven by unfamiliarity with offspring location and associated with androgenic shifts in mimic poison frogs.Hormones and behavior · 2024Article
- Infanticide is driven by unfamiliarity with offspring location and associated with androgenic shifts in mimic poison frogs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- What Amphibians Can Teach Us About the Evolution of Parental Care.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2023Article
- Form, function, foam: evolutionary ecology of anuran nests and nesting behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Contrasting parental roles shape sex differences in poison frog space use but not navigational performance.eLife · 2022Article
- Alloparental care in glassfrogs: males care for unrelated clutches only when associated with their own.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The Parental Dilemma: How Evolution of Diverse Strategies for Infant Care Informs Social Behavior Circuits.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2021Article
- Frank Beach Award Winner: Lessons from poison frogs on ecological drivers of behavioral diversification.Hormones and behavior · 2020Review
- Developments in Amphibian Parental Care Research: History, Present Advances, and Future Perspectives.Herpetological monograph · 2020Article
- Oviposition and father presence reduce clutch cannibalism by female poison frogs.Frontiers in zoology · 2019Article
- Gender-specific differences in cannibalism between a laboratory strain and a field strain of a predatory mite.Experimental & applied acarology · 2018Article
- Article
- Induced parental care in a poison frog: a tadpole cross-fostering experiment.The Journal of experimental biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Systematic infanticide of unrelated young has been reported in several animal taxa. Particular attention has been given to carnivores and primates, where infanticide is a sexually selected strategy of males to gain increased access to female mating partners. Cannibals must ensure avoiding their own offspring and targeting only unrelated young. Therefore, decision rules are needed to mediate parental and cannibalistic behaviour. Here we show experimentally that male poison frogs adjust their parental responses - care or infanticide - towards unrelated clutches according to their territorial status. Male frogs followed the simple rule 'care for any clutch' inside their territory, but immediately switched to cannibalism when establishing a new territory. This demonstrates that simple cognitive rules can mediate complex behaviours such as parental care, and that care and cannibalism are antagonistically linked. Non-parental infanticide is mediated by territorial cues and presumably serves to prevent misdirected care in this poison frog. Our results thus prompt a re-consideration of evolutionary and causal aspects of parental decision making, by suggesting that selective infanticide of unrelated young may generally become adaptive when the risks and costs of misdirected care are high.
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