University of New Hampshire Durham, New Hampshire, United States
In many contexts, parental care evolves as a mechanism to enhance offspring fitness in stochastic environments. However, in addition to parental care, females may differentially provision young with resources. For instance, in birds and insects, females will allocate steroid hormones to eggs which can provide young with a competitive advantage. For insects, ecdysone has been well studied with respect to its regulatory effect on development and behavior. However, no studies have investigated how maternal ecdysone provisioning to developing eggs may vary in response to reproductive strategy. Nicrophorine beetles 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 they 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.
