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

József Garay, Villő Csiszár, Tamás F. Móri, András Szilágyi, Zoltán Varga, Szabolcs Számadó, Gregorio Moreno-Rueda
2018 PLoS ONE  
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 lifehistory 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
more » ... estlings 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. Citation: Garay J, Csiszár V, Móri TF, Szilágyi A, Varga Z, Számadó S (2018) Juvenile honest food solicitation and parental investment as a life history strategy: A kin demographic selection model. PLoS ONE 13(3): e0193420. https://doi.org/10.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0193420 pmid:29494630 pmcid:PMC5832247 fatcat:kn2yvo7kvrh6xemda6c2jfbyxy