BayCEER Workshop 2025

Composure and Decomposition: State of carcass, not parental care pattern, shapes investment into personal immunity of Nicrophorus vespilloides offspring

O 2.2 in Animal Ecology in Action

09.10.2025, 11:45-12:00, H 36

During the period of post-hatching care parents take over energy consuming tasks, e.g. social immunity and foraging, which benefits the offspring yet is costly for parents. Biparental care reduces the individual costs by dividing the workload between both parents, as each parent often specializes in different care aspects, e.g. males typically providing less food and focusing on brood guarding. The facultative biparental care of Nicrophorus vespilloides involves control of the carcass microbiome through application of antimicrobial exudates, shielding their offspring from potential pathogens. To explore how social immunity and its effect on the offspring is shaped by parental care, we presented breeding beetles of Nicrophorus vespilloides with old or fresh mouse carcasses and manipulated the mode of parental care during the period of post-hatching care, by removing either the female or male parent. We then investigated how offspring are affected by monitoring performance parameters as well as their investment into personal immunity and found that carcass age and mode of parental care influenced early larval development and survival, while carcass age alone affects the number of haemocytes of larvae, indicating an investment into their personal immunity depending on their surroundings. Simultaneously, our results show that uniparental care is more costly to a single parent than if the work is divided between two parents. Overall, we show that offspring of a facultative subsocial species can adjust their investment into personal immunity based on environmental threats independently of the parental care they receive.

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