BIOC54H3 Lecture : BIOC54 W8L7
Document Summary
Bioc54 w8l7: kinship, cooperation, and parental care. Males and females contribute to cooperative breeding. taking care of young, feeding the young building nests, etc. It"s a very complex society, where multiple individuals are occupying different tasks: breeders, helpers (aka alloparents) So, there is help between and across groups. Activities of an adult that enhances the survivorship of offspring: food, protection, nurturing, teaching, building nests, borrows, and protecting territories, production of gametes, care of eggs. Parental investment is different from parental care. Extent to which parental care of individual offspring reduces the parent"s residual reproductive value. When should you invest in care: depends on if caring will increase the caregiver"s lifetime reproductive success, inevitably, greater investment in young limits the number of young that can be produced. In other words, the time spent caring for the young is keeping them away from additional reproductive output.
