ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Parental provisioning drives brain size in birds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Territoriality modulates the coevolution of cooperative breeding and female song in songbirds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Developmental underpinnings of morphological disparity in the avian bony palate.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Parental investment and body temperature explain encephalization in vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Slowly but Surely: Larger Brains Improve Immature Survival in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Palaeognath birds innovate to solve a novel foraging problem.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Relative Brain Size and Avoidance of Vehicular Collisions in Birds is Subtle.Zoological studies · 2025Article
- Co-evolutionary dynamics of mammalian brain and body size.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Convergent evolution toward a slow pace of life predisposes insular endotherms to anthropogenic extinctions.Science advances · 2024Article
- Short-term memory, attentional control and brain size in primates.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Does the expensive brain hypothesis apply to amphibians and reptiles?BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Extended parental provisioning and variation in vertebrate brain sizes.PLoS biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Large brains support numerous cognitive adaptations and therefore may appear to be highly beneficial. Nonetheless, the high energetic costs of brain tissue may have prevented the evolution of large brains in many species. This problem may also have a developmental dimension: juveniles, with their immature and therefore poorly performing brains, would face a major energetic hurdle if they were to pay for the construction of their own brain, especially in larger-brained species. Here, we explore the possible role of parental provisioning for the development and evolution of adult brain size in birds. A comparative analysis of 1,176 bird species shows that various measures of parental provisioning (precocial vs. altricial state at hatching, relative egg mass, time spent provisioning the young) strongly predict relative brain size across species. The parental provisioning hypothesis also provides an explanation for the well-documented but so far unexplained pattern that altricial birds have larger brains than precocial ones. We therefore conclude that the evolution of parental provisioning allowed species to overcome the seemingly insurmountable energetic constraint on growing large brains, which in turn enabled bird species to increase survival and population stability. Because including adult eco- and socio-cognitive predictors only marginally improved the explanatory value of our models, these findings also suggest that the traditionally assessed cognitive abilities largely support successful parental provisioning. Our results therefore indicate that the cognitive adaptations underlying successful parental provisioning also provide the behavioral flexibility facilitating reproductive success and survival.
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