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Individual variation in parental care drives divergence of sex roles

Xiaoyan Long, Franz J. Weissing
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.18.344218
Xiaoyan Long
1Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
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Franz J. Weissing
1Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
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  • For correspondence: x.long@rug.nl f.j.weissing@rug.nl
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Abstract

In many animal species, parents provide care for their offspring, but the parental roles of the two sexes differ considerably between and within species. Here, we use an individual-based simulation approach to investigate the evolutionary emergence and stability of parental roles. Our conclusions are in striking contrast to the results of analytical models. In the absence of initial differences between the sexes, our simulations do not predict the evolution of egalitarian care, but either female-biased or male-biased care. When the sexes differ in their pre-mating investment, the sex with the highest investment tends to evolve a higher level of parental care; this outcome does not depend on non-random mating or uncertainty of paternity. If parental investment evolves jointly with sexual selection strategies, evolution results in either the combination of female-biased care and female choosiness or in male-biased care and the absence of female preferences. The simulations suggest that the parental care pattern drives sexual selection, and not vice versa. Finally, our model reveals that a population can rapidly switch from one type of equilibrium to another one, suggesting that parental sex roles are evolutionarily labile. By combining simulation results with fitness calculations, we argue that all these results are caused by the emergence of individual variation in parental care strategies, a factor that was hitherto largely neglected in sex-role evolution theory.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://github.com/xiaoyanlong/evolution-of-sex-roles

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted October 18, 2020.
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Individual variation in parental care drives divergence of sex roles
Xiaoyan Long, Franz J. Weissing
bioRxiv 2020.10.18.344218; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.18.344218
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Individual variation in parental care drives divergence of sex roles
Xiaoyan Long, Franz J. Weissing
bioRxiv 2020.10.18.344218; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.18.344218

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