Sex allocation within broods: The intrabrood sharing-out hypothesis

Abstract

Selection is expected to cause parents to adjust the sex of their offspring when the environment is predictable during development, and it is expected to affect each sex differently. When several offspring compete for limited resources, the environmental conditions acting on the brood are not a good predictor of the conditions affecting individual offspring. There is evidence for some species that, regardless of any bias in brood sex ratio, the sex of individual offspring within a brood may be related to its position in the hatching/birth/weight rank, in ways that might correlate with the expected share of available resources. Here I propose that parents may be selected to adjust offspring sex within the brood, provided that some depreciable environmental quality is unequally distributed among siblings in a predictable manner. I call this the "intrabrood sharing-out" hypothesis and present a graphical model to derive predictions about the relationship between offspring sex and positions within the brood. The model considers that sibling competition not only produces differences in the mean share of resources among siblings, but it also increases the predictability of the share obtained by high-ranking sibs and decreases the predictability of the share for low-ranking ones. Consequently, parents should be selected to deal with such a distribution by promoting the conditions to make it more predictable and then adaptively adjust the sex of particular siblings, especially in high-ranking positions within the brood, rather than to modify the sex ratio of the brood as a whole.