Academics

Abstract  

Most species lack parental care and leave their offspring to fend for themselves after copulation and birth. Nonetheless, in some species, parental care is essential to the survival of the offspring. It is important to the overall fitness of the parent because with offspring survival, parental genes are passed on in the population. Parental care can come about in many different forms, depending on the species and which parent provides it. Care can be short lived and just aim to help offspring survive past larval stages, or it could also consist of near lifelong bonds that aid in learning for future reproduction. In the species that do exhibit parental care, maternal care is what is expected to arise from the ancestral state of no parental care, since females are the sex that are believed to invest the most in the reproductive process. However, paternal care has been highly selected for over maternal or in addition to maternal care in a variety of species, with males either being the sole providers of resources or both parents aiding in the care for offspring. I aim to identify why and how paternal care has evolved over other forms of parental care in different species and how this has benefitted the overall parental fitness of the given species. In order to do this, I will look at a multitude of different taxa who exhibit solely paternal care and paternal care in addition to maternal care to see how it differs in different taxa, conveying that paternal care has evolved in different areas for different reasons. In addition, investigating specific parental behaviors males display to determine whether these behaviors are more costly or beneficial to their fitness, which helps determine the evolution of male parental care. 

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