Parental Care

• Parental Investment: Parental care evolves where the benefits outweigh the individual costs.
• For instance, in a certain lizard species, parental care is genetically encoded and occurs on islands with the highest predation pressure, where it enhances offspring survival, this is an example of?

  Parental investment
• List examples of parental investments?

  • Feeding and nurturing
  • Protection
  • Bodily Sacrifice
  • Teaching
  • Provision of Shelter
• Terminal investment relates to knowing death is near, and putting more into breeding efforts to increase individual genetic evolution
• The evolution of parental care is driven by the balance between its benefits and costs?

  Parental Investment
• Variable Environments: In unstable environments, parents may invest more in offspring—for instance, blue-footed boobies creating egg disparities.
• Terminal Investment Hypothesis: Parents increase current offspring investment if future reproduction is unlikely (death is near), seen in older females allocating more resources to broods.
• Sex Biases in Parental Investment: Care is mostly female-driven, with male-only care rare and found in species like teleost fish and amphibians.
• Human mothers significantly impact child survival, and paternal care can be influenced by testosterone.
• The self-sufficient nuclear family concept is unusual in human evolutionary history, which shows communal child-rearing relates to why concept?

  Nuclear Families
• Paternity uncertainty explains why females are more likely to complete parental care, rather than males, because cost of caring for the wrong offspring is highly costly
• What element of a human community is highly important for offspring survival?


  Role of the maternal grandmother
• Our most recent evolution in parental care found in western communities is the nuclear model one father, one mother, and two children