RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 How do ecological and social environments reflect parental roles in birds? A comparative analysis
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.12.24.424295
DO 10.1101/2020.12.24.424295
A1 Xiaoyan Long
A1 Yang Liu
A1 András Liker
A1 Franz J. Weissing
A1 Jan Komdeur
A1 Tamás Székely
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/24/2020.12.24.424295.abstract
AB Parental roles are highly diverse in animal taxa. Since caring is an important determinant of fitness, understanding the origin and maintenance of various parental care strategies is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we investigate parental care patterns in birds, which exhibit a remarkable diversity of parental sex roles. By means of phylogenetically informed comparative analyses we investigate whether and how care provisioning is predicted by ecology and social environment. Making use of the most comprehensive dataset including 1101 species that represent 126 avian families, we show that sex differences in parental care are neither related to food type nor to nest type, two key ecological factors. However, we found an effect of the social environment, as males tend to care relatively more in in colonial species than in non-colonial species. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of social effects for evolution of diverse parental sex roles.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.