Title:

The evolution of parental care: How strategy relates to female egg hormone allocation in Nicrophorine beetles

Environmental stochasticity has exerted strong selective factors across taxa, which often manifest in behavioral strategies which promote organism fitness. Parental care is one commonly observed behavioral mechanism organisms use to enhance offspring success. However, in addition to parental care, females may differentially provision young with resources to enhance survival. For instance, in birds and insects, females will allocate steroid hormones to eggs which can provide young with a competitive advantage in response to altered offspring development rate and behavioral phenotype. For insects, ecdysone has been well studied with respect to its regulatory effect on development and behavior. However, no studies have investigated how maternal provisioning of ecdysone to developing eggs may vary in response to reproductive strategy. Burying beetles (Nicrophorinae) are an excellent system to investigate whether evolved differences in parental care strategy is coupled with differing levels of maternal hormone provisioning to eggs, as burying beetles exhibit variation in the level of parental care required for successful offspring development. This study investigates whether three species of Nicrophorine beetles with differing levels of care (no care, facultative care, full care) also exhibit quantifiable differences in the level of ecdysteroid hormones allocated to newly laid eggs.

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