Male Parental Care: The Evolution Of Male Parental Care

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Parental care can be defined as parents’ investment in the offspring post egg laying or birth of the young ones. Hence, it does not count the initial investment involved in gamete production (Ridley, 1978; Wells, 2008). In many animals belonging to diverse taxa, neither male nor female offer parental care in which the offspring are left at the mercy of nature whereas, in others only one parent, either male or female, cares for the offspring. In still others both the parents jointly take the responsibility of caring their progeny (Reynolds et al., 2012). Evolution of this diversity in parental care can be explained with the help of cost/benefit ratio of providing the parental care. Lack (1954) proposed a principle to explain the evolution of parental care and the relative investment by the …show more content…

Female parental care (maternal care) seems to be logical and prevalent in animals than the male parental care (paternal care) and these differences in parental investments by male and female are associated to the differences in their reproductive investments (Trivers, 1972). However, there are many vertebrate species in which males contribute significantly towards parental care (Nunes et al., 2001; Chen et al., 2007). Male parental care seems to be rare in animals having internal fertilisation (Duellman and Trueb, 1994) and is most likely to evolve in species with external fertilisation (Gross and Shine, 1981; Beck, 1998). But there another school of thoughts predicts that evolution of parental care is more dependent on the costs and benefits ration than the mode of fertilisation (Beck, 1998). Apparently, evolution of paternal care depends on a) the mode of fertilization, b) territoriality and c) female mate choice or female fecundity (Ridley, 1978; Gross and Shine,

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