Juvenile honest food solicitation and parental investment as a life history strategy: A kin demographic selection model

PLoS One. 2018 Mar 1;13(3):e0193420. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193420. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Parent-offspring communication remains an unresolved challenge for biologist. The difficulty of the challenge comes from the fact that it is a multifaceted problem with connections to life-history evolution, parent-offspring conflict, kin selection and signalling. Previous efforts mainly focused on modelling resource allocation at the expense of the dynamic interaction during a reproductive season. Here we present a two-stage model of begging where the first stage models the interaction between nestlings and parents within a nest and the second stage models the life-history trade-offs. We show in an asexual population that honest begging results in decreased variance of collected food between siblings, which leads to mean number of surviving offspring. Thus, honest begging can be seen as a special bet-hedging against informational uncertainty, which not just decreases the variance of fitness but also increases the arithmetic mean.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Feeding Behavior
  • Life History Traits*
  • Markov Chains
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Phenotype
  • Seasons

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office NKFIH: K 125569 (T.M.), K 108974 (J.G. and SZ.SZ), K 119347 (A.SZ) (http://nkfih.gov.hu/english); European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) in Hungary (GINOP 2.3.2-15-2016-00057) (https://www.palyazat.gov.hu/evaluation); and European Research Council (No 648693) (https://erc.europa.eu/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.