How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour
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How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour∗ 15. Why Do Parents and Offspring Quarrel? Raghavendra Gadagkar
Parental Care Since all of us have been children at some time in our lives, and many of us have also been parents at other times, we are well aware of the psychological and physiological importance of parental care, both for the offspring as well as for the parents. But at the same time, we are also painfully aware that there is often some conflict between parents and their offspring about the amount of parental investment that should flow from parents to offspring. As evolutionary biologists, however, we must pause and ask: why the conflict? According to the theory of natural selection, living organisms are expected to maximize their Darwinian fitness. Since offspring are the currency of Darwinian fitness, should not ‘parent-offspring conflict’ be an oxymoron? Why should there be a conflict between parents and offspring? Offspring should be selected to survive and grow, and have offspring of their own, and parents should be selected to do everything in their power to help the offspring to achieve their goals. Indeed, there is no parent-offspring conflict in some species, notably, in those species that produce a single offspring or produce all their offspring in one go, and die. There is nothing more important for parents of such species than the welfare of their offspring, leaving no scope for parent-offspring conflict. The honour of being the paragon of parenthood—motherhood really—seems to have been bestowed on the spider by both artists and scientists. The French-American artist Louise Jos´ephine Bour-
∗
Raghavendra Gadagkar is DST Year of Science Chair Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Honorary Professor at JNCASR, and Non-Resident Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), Berlin. During the past 40 years he has established an active school of research in the area of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution. The origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially in social insects, such as ants, bees and wasps, is a major goal of his research. http://ces.iisc.ac.in/hpg/ragh. https://www.researchgate.net/ profile/Raghavendra Gadagkar
Vol.25, No.11, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-020-1077-9
RESONANCE | November 2020
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SERIES ARTICLE
Figure 1.
(Left) The French-American artist Louise Jos´ephine Bourgeois (1911–2010) (Portrait by Subhankar Biswas) and (Right) her famous installation Maman (1990) in Ottawa, Canada, a sculpture of a spider, symbolising the ultimate in motherhood. (“Maman-Spider SculptureNational Gallery of Canada” by Arch Sam is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Keywords Free-ranging dogs, stray dogs, parental
investment,
offspring conflict, care, alloparenting.
1596
parent-
grandmother
geois (1911–2010) celebrated the motherhood of the spider by erecting a mammoth 30 feet tall metal statue of a spider and christening it Maman (meaning ‘mother’ in French) (Figure 1). Maman (1990) h
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