ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The evolution of paternal care: a role for microbes?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The Larval and Adult Female Gut Microbiomes of Two Burying Beetles (Nicrophorus spp.) With Distinct Parental Care Traits.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Little Peacemakers: Microbes Can Promote Nonviolent Conflict Resolution by Their Hosts.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Insect-microbe interactions and their influence on organisms and ecosystems.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Evolutionary modeling suggests that addictions may be driven by competition-induced microbiome dysbiosis.Communications biology · 2023Article
- A Review of the Impact of Maternal Prenatal Stress on Offspring Microbiota and Metabolites.Metabolites · 2023Review
- Social complexity as a driving force of gut microbiota exchange among conspecific hosts in non-human primates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Review
- Non-vertical cultural transmission, assortment and the evolution of cooperation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The call of the wild: using non-model systems to investigate microbiome-behaviour relationships.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Review
- The role of the microbiome in host evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Paternal care, particularly in cases of uncertain paternity, carries significant costs. Extensive research, both theoretical and experimental, has explored the conditions in which paternal care behaviour would be favoured. Common explanations include an adjustment of care with uncertainty in paternity and limited accuracy in parentage assessment. Here, we propose a new explanation that microbes may play a role in the evolution of paternal care among their hosts. Using computational models, we demonstrate that microbes associated with increased paternal care could be favoured by natural selection. We find that microbe-induced paternal care could evolve under wider conditions than suggested by genetic models. Moreover, we show that microbe-induced paternal care is more likely to evolve when considering paternal care interactions that increase microbial transmission, such as feeding and grooming. Our results imply that factors affecting the composition of host microbiome may also alter paternal behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue 'The role of the microbiome in host evolution'.
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