ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Biparental care is more than the sum of its parts: experimental evidence for synergistic effects on offspring fitness.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 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
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ecological and social factors lead to variation in parental care between sexes in a burying beetle.Insect science · 2026Article
- Plasticity in parental care: Interspecific competitor cues shape biparental cooperation in a burying beetle.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Thermal Stress Has Size-Dependent but Not Sex-Specific Effects on Mortality in an Insect Model.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Oxidative stress: a sex-specific cost of parental care.Biology open · 2026Article
- Real-time context-dependent cooperation in parental provisioning reveals fitness payoffs in barn owls.iScience · 2025Article
- Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society.Science advances · 2025Article
- Burying beetles as a model organism to study sex differences in parental care.Insectes sociaux · 2025Review
- Experience and trust: the benefits of mate familiarity are realized through sex-specific specialization of parental roles in Cassin's auklet.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Intraspecific Variation in Parental Care May Reflect Variation in Parental Quality.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Chronic and acute thermal stressors have non-additive effects on fertility.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Selection on the joint actions of pairs leads to divergent adaptation and coadaptation of care-giving parents during pre-hatching care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Transient polymorphisms in parental care strategies drive divergence of sex roles.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Harsh nutritional environment has positive and negative consequences for family living in a burying beetle.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Situating the Father: Strengthening Interdisciplinary Collaborations between Sociology, History and the Emerging POHaD Paradigm.Nutrients · 2022Review
- Social animal models for quantifying plasticity, assortment, and selection on interacting phenotypes.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2022Article
- Sex-specific influence of communal breeding experience on parenting performance and fitness in a burying beetle.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Tri-axial accelerometry shows differences in energy expenditure and parental effort throughout the breeding season in long-lived raptors.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Allopreening in the Black-browed Albatross (The Ibis · 2021Article
- Constrained flexibility of parental cooperation limits adaptive responses to harsh conditions.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2021Article
- Gender Beneath the Skull: Agency, Trauma and Persisting Stereotypes in Neuroepigenetics.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite an extensive body of theoretical and empirical literature on biparental cooperation, it is still unclear whether offspring fare equally, better or worse when receiving care by two parents versus a single parent. Some models predict that parents should withhold the amount of care they provide due to sexual conflict, thereby shifting as much of the workload as possible to their partner. This conflict should lead to offspring faring worse with two parents. Yet, other models predict that when parents care for their offspring together, their individual contributions can have synergistic (more than additive) effects on offspring fitness. Under this scenario, biparental cooperation should lead to offspring faring better with two parents. We address this fundamental question using a unique experimental design where we compared offspring fitness when the two parents worked together (biparental treatment) and when they worked separately (uniparental treatment), while keeping constant the amount of resources and number of offspring per parent across treatments. This made it possible to directly compare the biparental treatment to the sum of the male and female contributions in the uniparental treatment. Our main finding was that offspring grew larger and were more likely to survive to adulthood when reared by both parents than a single parent. This is the first empirical evidence for a synergistic effect of biparental cooperation on offspring fitness and could provide novel insights into the conditions favouring the evolution of biparental cooperation.
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.