BayCEER Workshop 2026

Challenging Upbringing – Quality of Parental Care influences early Offspring Development in a Facultatively Caring Beetle

3.1 in Afternoon Session II

08.10.2026, 15:15-15:30, H 36

As parents take over energy-consuming tasks such as food provisioning and predator protection for the offspring’s benefit during parental care, they also protect their offspring from infectious diseases through the exhibition of social immunity. But how the evolution of offspring dependency on parental care has been shaped by this parental pathogen protection remains poorly understood. To address this question, we took advantage of Nicrophorus burying beetles, who exhibit intensive parental care and social immunity but greatly vary in their offspring dependency. We simultaneously manipulated the carcass microbial environment as well as the quality of parental care by providing breeding pairs of Nicrophorus with either a fresh or an old carcass, and by injecting females with immune elicitors. We investigated consequences of changes in social and carcass environment quality by measuring the immunity of Nicrophorus females and their larvae. We find that during the time of parental care, females of more dependent larvae change their investment based on their own health but not necessarily based on the carcass environment, while Nicrophorus larvae of the three species react differently to both the quality of parental care and carcass quality. Our findings emphasize that during parent-offspring-coadaptation, the evolutionary process can affect offsprings’ ability to react to changing environmental conditions, providing novel insights into the evolution and maintenance of offspring dependence on parental care.

Nicrophorus vespilloides female in the act of feeding her larvae on the prepared mouse carcass, which serves as their food resource and nursery during the time of parental care. Image is used with permission by Heiko Bellmann.

Keywords: Social Immunity Evolutionary Biology Parental Care Nicrophorus SUbsociality

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