Macroecology of parental care in arthropods: higher mortality risk leads to higher benefits of offspring protection in tropical climates

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12303. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Eduardo S. A. Santos, Pedro Penna Bueno, James Gilbert, Glauco Machado

Abstract

The intensity of biotic interactions varies around the world, in such a way that mortality risk imposed by natural enemies is usually higher in the tropics. A major role of offspring attendance is protection against natural enemies, so the benefits of this behaviour should be higher in tropical regions. We tested this macroecological prediction with a meta‐regression of field experiments in which the mortality of guarded and unguarded broods was compared in arthropods. Mortality of unguarded broods was higher, and parental care was more beneficial, in warmer, less seasonal environments. Moreover, in these same environments, additional lines of defence further reduced offspring mortality, implying that offspring attendance alone is not enough to deter natural enemies in tropical regions. These results help to explain the high frequency of parental care among tropical species and how biotic interactions influence the occurrence of parental care over large geographic scales. Finally, our findings reveal that additional lines of defences – an oftentimes neglected component of parental care – have an important effect on the covariation between the benefits of parental care and the climate‐mediated mortality risk imposed by natural enemies.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/zqes4

Subjects

Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Keywords

abiotic factors, biotic interactions, egg attendance, egg coating, evapotranspiration, meta‐regression, nest parasitism, parental removal, predation

Dates

Published: 2019-01-11 08:43

License

CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International