The Impact of Parental Size on The Effectiveness of Parental Care
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Authors
Parker, Hughes
Issue Date
2022-05-08
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
University of the South , Biology Department , Senior Honor Theses 2022 , Parental care , burying beetles , size effects
Alternative Title
Abstract
In animals with parental care the amount or quality of care the parent provides can have a large impact on the development of the offsprings phenotype and ultimately it’s fitness. Variation in the quality of parental care is often associated with variation in other aspects of the parental phenotype. For example, in the burying beetle (Niceophorus vespilloides) the effectiveness of parental care is determined by maternal size. The large mother is providing better care than small mothers. In the study, I conducted to experiment to test whether they’re similar size base parental effects in another burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis. The species differs from. N. vespilloides in two important ways. First, parental care in N. orbicollis is obligate while it is facultative in N. vespilloides. Second, biparental care is beneficial in N. orbicollis while males do not appear to contribute much in N. Vespilloides. My first experiment focused solely on the impact of female body size on the effectiveness of parental care. I phenotypicslly engineered females to be large or small and then measured their reproductive performance. I found that large female broods produced broods of larger offspring than small females, consistent with the pattern seen in previous studies of N. vespilloides. My second experiment examined the joint effects of female and male body size on the effectiveness of parental care. I conducted crosses in which I factorially manipulated parental body size, and for each cross, I recorded the number and size of offspring that were produced. I found the female body size influence, the offspring size at dispersal; however, there were no affects of male size or the interaction between male and female size. My results demonstrate size dependent maternal effects in N. orbicollis, with bigger mothers providing more effective parental care than smaller mothers. Furthermore, male body size does not appear to influence the number or size of offspring produced, either directly or through an interaction with female size. These results show that mothers have the primary influence over offspring size.
Description
Citation
Publisher
University of the South