title: Flexible compensation of uniparental care: female poison frogs take over when males disappear.
abstract: Parental care systems are shaped by costs and benefits to each sex of investing into current versus future progeny. Flexible compensatory parental care is mainly known in biparental species, particularly where parental desertion or reduction of care by 1 parent is common. The other parent can then compensate this loss by either switching parental roles and/or by increasing its own parental effort. In uniparental species, desertion of the caregiver usually leads to total brood loss. In the poison frog,Allobates femoralis, obligatory tadpole transport (TT) is generally performed by males, whereas females abandon their clutches after oviposition. Nevertheless, in a natural population we previously observed 7.8% of TT performed by females, which we could link to the absence of the respective fathers. In the following experiment, under laboratory conditions, all testedA. femoralisfemales flexibly took over parental duties, but only when their mates were removed. Our findings provide clear evidence for compensatory flexibility in a species with unisexual parental care. Contrary to the view of amphibian parental care as being stereotypical and fixed, these results demonstrate behavioral flexibility as an adaptive response to environmental and social uncertainty. Behavioral flexibility might actually represent a crucial step in the evolutionary transition from uniparental to biparental care in poison frogs. We suspect that across animal species flexible parental roles are much more common than previously thought and suggest the idea of a 3-dimensional continuum regarding flexibility, parental involvement, and timing, when thinking about the evolution of parental care.
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Zoology , ; Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna , Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna , Austria , and ; Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna , 1210 Vienna , Austria.
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ringler
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna , Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna , Austria , and.
authors.forename: Andrius
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pašukonis
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna , Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna , Austria , and.
authors.forename: W Tecumseh
authors.initials: WT
authors.lastname: Fitch
authors.affiliation: Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna , 1210 Vienna , Austria.
authors.forename: Ludwig
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Huber
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Zoology .
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hödl
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Zoology .
authors.forename: Max
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ringler
keywords: behavioral flexibility; compensation; partner removal; poison frog; tadpole transport; uniparental care.