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

Garay, József and Csiszár, Villő and Móri, Tamás F. and Szilágyi, András and Varga, Zoltán and Számadó, Szabolcs (2018) Juvenile honest food solicitation and parental investment as a life history strategy: A kin demographic selection model. PLOS ONE, 13 (3). pp. 1-13. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

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 life-history 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 nestlings 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. © 2018 Garay et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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