Early developmental morphology reflects independence from parents in social beetles

Abstract

The variation in degree of offspring dependence in parents where parental care has evolved is striking, from feeding independence at birth to complete dependence on parents for all nutritional resources. This presents an evolutionary puzzle. Why lose the ability to feed as a contingency when parents may die or abandon broods? Comparisons of altricial and precocial vertebrates suggest that there may be life-history and developmental costs to early independence1-3. The generality of this beyond vertebrates is unclear, but we can extend the comparison as invertebrate species also vary in the level of independence in early life-history stages. For example, larvae of several burying beetle species (Nicrophorus), a genus in which parents regurgitate pre-digested food to begging larvae, have lost the ability to self-feed thus creating complete parental dependency for first instars4. Here, we ask whether variation in dependency amongst burying beetles is related to heterochrony in development of a more complex morphological structures. We show that the rate of development and allometry of mandibles of precocial larvae that can self-feed from birth are the same as those in altricial larvae that cannot survive without parenting. Instead, self-feeding is associated with shape variation in mandibles. In altricial species first instar larvae have smooth mandibles, whereas in precocial species mandibles are serrated. Later instars, which can self-feed in all species, have serrated mandibles. Serrations on teeth generally function to “grip and rip”5, whereas smooth blades function more to puncture6, and broods of altricial but not precocial Nicrophorus larvae show evidence for siblicide. We therefore suggest that altricial first-instar mandibles function more as weapons than feeding tools when released from self-feeding. This study presents a novel coevolution between developmental timing and parenting potentially mediated by sibling competition.