Parental care: Adjustments to conflict and cooperation

Abstract

In many species parental care is needed to rear offspring that survive to reproduce, a good measure of benefits in fitness terms. Such care may involve major costs to the individual. Balancing benefits and costs of care almost inevitably leads to tensions among individuals that provide and use the resource 'parental care'. Thus parental care and with it parental investment (i.e. the ultimate costs of care) is enacted in a game of conflict and cooperation. Using mostly examples from mammals, I discuss Tinbergen's four questions as they apply to parental care. Phylogenetic analyses of parental care are complicated by substantial intraspecific variability of this trait. Understanding the physiological and ontogenetic processes underlying parental care behaviour helps to understand how differences in the cost of care depend on the state of parents and their environment. A deeper insight into the strategies of conflict and cooperation in care can be derived from consideration of the behavioural mechanisms available to participants.© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights reserved.