Being a good father may lead burying beetles to early death

London: Male insects with low-quality partners try to compensate for their mate's shortcomings by putting more effort into parental duties, and could pay the price by dying younger, a new study on burying beetles has found.

The study on burying beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, also found that bad parenting creates bad parents-to-be, while well-cared for larvae mature into high quality parents.

"Parents obviously play a huge role in determining the characteristics of their offspring," said lead researcher Rebecca Kilner from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in UK.

"The aim of our study was to investigate non-genetic ways that parents achieve this," Kilner said.

This is important because non-genetic inheritance could speed up the rate at which animal behaviour evolves and adapts in a rapidly changing world.

In both mothers or fathers, individuals that received no care as larvae were less effective at raising a large brood as parents, and died younger.

In contrast, high quality care not only produces a larger brood, but individual offspring with a higher mass. This is consistent with previous studies.

"We found that parental care provides a mechanism for non-genetic inheritance. Good quality parents produce offspring that become good parents themselves, while offspring that receive poor parenting then become low quality parents," Kilner said.

"Our experiments show how parental care allows offspring to inherit characteristics of their parents, but non-genetically," she said.

However, the team also found that offspring pay a cost for receiving high quality care, because it makes them vulnerable to exploitation if they pair up with a lower quality partner.

This may explain why animals often choose a mate that is willing to put in a similar amount of effort as them as a parent. In this way, they are less vulnerable to exploitation.

The burying beetle uses the carcass of a small vertebrate such as a mouse as an edible nest for its young.

As its name suggests, a breeding pair buries the carcass and preserves it with an antibacterial secretion. The mother lays eggs nearby in the soil, and the larvae crawl to the carcass when they hatch.

Although the larvae can feed themselves, they also beg both parents for partly-digested food from the carcass.

When males were paired with females that had received no post-hatching care as larvae, they had significantly shorter lives than those whose partners had received more care.

The most likely explanation is that males with low quality partners put more effort into parental duties to compensate for the shortcomings of their mate, and paid the price by dying younger, the researchers said.

The research will be published in the journal eLife.