The origins of parent-offspring signalling

Coevolutionary feedbacks between family interactions and life history

Families with parental care show a parent-offspring conflict over the amount of parental investment. To date, the resolution of this conflict was modeled as being driven by either purely within-brood or between-brood competition. In reality the partitioning of parental resources within- versus between-broods is an evolving life history trait, which can be affected by parent-offspring interactions. This coevolutionary feedback between life history and family interactions may influence the evolutionary process and outcome of parent-offspring coadaptation. We used a genetic framework for a simulation model where we allowed parental parity to coevolve with traits that determine parental investment. The model included unlinked loci for clutch size, parental sensitivity, baseline provisioning, and offspring begging. The simulation showed that tight coadaptation of parent and offspring traits only occurred in iteroparous outcomes whereas semelparous outcomes were characterized by weak coadaptation. When genetic variation in clutch size was unrestricted in the ancestral population, semelparity and maximal begging with poor coadaptation evolved throughout. Conversely, when genetic variation was limited to iteroparous conditions, and/or when parental sensitivity was treated as an evolutionarily fixed sensory bias, coadapted outcomes were more likely. Our findings show the influence of a feedback between parity, coadaptation, and conflict on the evolution of parent-offspring interactions.

Antagonistic parent-offspring co-adaptation

Background

In species across taxa, offspring have means to influence parental investment (PI). PI thus evolves as an interacting phenotype and indirect genetic effects may strongly affect the co-evolutionary dynamics of offspring and parental behaviors. Evolutionary theory focused on explaining how exaggerated offspring solicitation can be understood as resolution of parent-offspring conflict, but the evolutionary origin and diversification of different forms of family interactions remains unclear.

Methodology/Principal Findings

In contrast to previous theory that largely uses a static approach to predict how “offspring individuals” and “parental individuals” should interact given conflict over PI, we present a dynamic theoretical framework of antagonistic selection on the PI individuals obtain/take as offspring and the PI they provide as parents to maximize individual lifetime reproductive success; we analyze a deterministic and a stochastic version of this dynamic framework. We show that a zone for equivalent co-adaptation outcomes exists in which stable levels of PI can evolve and be maintained despite fast strategy transitions and ongoing co-evolutionary dynamics. Under antagonistic co-adaptation, cost-free solicitation can evolve as an adaptation to emerging preferences in parents.

Conclusions/Significance

We show that antagonistic selection across the offspring and parental life-stage of individuals favors co-adapted offspring and parental behavior within a zone of equivalent outcomes. This antagonistic parent-offspring co-adaptation does not require solicitation to be costly, allows for rapid divergence and evolutionary novelty and potentially explains the origin and diversification of the observed provisioning forms in family life.

Ontogeny in the family

When ontogeny takes place in a family, and parents provide essential resources for development, the parents become an environmental component to the development of a wide range of offspring traits. Because differences among parents may partly reflect genetic variation, this environmental component contains genes and may itself evolve. Also, when offspring play an active role in family interactions, offspring become a social environmental component to parents, affecting their behavior in turn, which potentially results in reciprocal social selection. Thus, an evolutionary process of coadaptation to family life, additionally driven by conflicts of interests, may have shaped the expression and development patterns underlying infant behaviors. The complex genetics arising from family interactions can be formalized by extending standard quantitative genetic models. These models demonstrate how the explicit consideration of the family environment can profoundly alter both the expression and evolutionary response to selection of behaviors involved in family interactions. Behavioral genetic studies have begun to unravel the complex genetics underlying infant solicitation behaviors and parental provisioning, although many focus on one side of the interaction. A genetic analysis incorporating interactions among family members explicitly may be critical because the genes underlying the expression of parental provisioning indirectly affect offspring behaviors, and vice versa.

Parent-offspring conflict theory, signaling of need, and weight gain in early life

Human growth in early life has major implications for fitness. During this period, the mother regulates the growth of her offspring through placental nutrition and lactation. However, parent-offspring conflict theory predicts that offspring are selected to demand more resources than the mother is selected to provide. This general issue has prompted the development of begging theory, which attempts to find the optimal levels of offspring demand and parental provisioning. Several models have been proposed to account for begging behavior, whether by biochemical or behavioral pathways, including: (1) blackmail of parents; (2) scramble competition between multiple offspring; (3) honest signaling of nutritional need; and (4) honest signaling of offspring worth. These models are all supported by data from nonhuman animals, with species varying according to which model is relevant. This paper examines the evidence that human suckling and crying signal nutritional demand, need, and worth to the mother. While suckling provides hormonal stimulation of breast milk production and signals hunger, crying fulfills a different role, with evidence suggesting that it signals both worth and need for resources (nutrition and thermoregulation). The role of signaling in nutritional demand is examined in the context of three common health problems that have traditionally been assumed to have physiological rather than behavioral causes: excess weight gain, failure to thrive, and colic. The value of such an evolutionary approach lies in its potential to enhance behavioral management of these conditions.

Begging and bleating: the evolution of parent-offspring signalling

The evolution of biological signalling in the face of evolutionary conflicts of interest is an active area of evolutionary ecology, and one to which Maynard Smith has made important contributions. We explore the major theoretical challenges in the field, concentrating largely on how offspring signal to their parents when there is the potential for parent-offspring conflict. Costly offspring solicitation (begging etc.) has been interpreted in terms of a Zahavi Grafen honest handicap signal, but this has been challenged on the grounds of' the costs of signalling. We review this controversy and also explore the issue of pooling versus separating signalling equilibrium. An alternative explanation for costly begging is that it is due to sibling competition, and we discuss the relationship between these ideas and signalling models in families with more than one offspring. Finally we consider signal uncertainty, how signalling models can be made dynamic, and briefly how they may be tested experimentally.

Sibling competition stabilizes signalling resolution models of parent-offspring conflict

Young of altricial birds use conspicuous displays to solicit food from their parents. There is experimental evidence that the intensity of these displays is correlated with the level of food deprivation of young, and that parents respond to increased levels of solicitation by increasing the rate of food delivery to the nest. Game-theoretical models based on the handicap principle show that, when solicitation is costly, there is a signalling equilibrium at which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the condition of the young and the intensity of their display. Parents use this information to adjust their levels of investment on the current offspring. However, the models also have a non-signalling equilibrium, and computer simulations show that only the non-signalling equilibrium is stable. Here I show that when direct sibling competition is introduced into the model, in such a way that parents have control on the amount of food provided to the nest, but not on the way the food is allocated among siblings, the non-signalling equilibrium disappears and the signalling equilibrium becomes stable.

Signaling of need, sibling competition, and the cost of honesty

Young birds and mammals frequently solicit food by means of extravagant and apparently costly begging displays. Much attention has been devoted to the idea that these displays are honest signals of need, and that their apparent cost serves to maintain their honesty. Recent analyses, however, have shown that the cost needed to maintain a fully informative, honest signal may often be so great that both offspring (signaler) and parent (receiver) would do better to refrain from communication. This apparently calls into question the relevance of the costly signaling hypothesis. Here, I show that this argument overlooks the impact of sibling competition. When multiple signalers must compete for the attention of a receiver (as is commonly the case in parent-offspring interactions), I show that (all other things being equal) individual equilibrium signal costs will typically be lower. The greater the number of competitors, the smaller the mean cost, though the maximum level of signal intensity employed by very needy signalers may actually increase with the number of competitors. At the same time, costs become increasingly sensitive to relatedness among signalers as opposed to relatedness between signalers and receivers. As a result of these trends, signaling proves profitable for signalers under a much wider range of conditions when there is competition (though it is still likely to be unprofitable for receivers).