Quantitative genetic study for parental care traits in a burrower bug, Adomerusrotundus

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Theory suggests that there would be a conflict of interest between parents and offspring in some animal species. Parents attempt to decide allocation of care investment among broods according to their own maximal fitness, while young try to manipulate their parents to maximize their own fitness. Such a conflict may lead toward an evolutionary solution, involving co-adaptation between care traits by parents and begging traits by offspring. However, genetic variation of both traits still remains to be recognized explicitly. Using a selection experiment, this study, therefore, aims to provide evidence that there is actually genetic variation in the parental care traits and offspring begging traits in a subsocial burrower bug, Adomerus rotundus, examining the heritability of such traits. We sequentially selected a laboratory population toward the direction for either increase (positive direction) or decrease (negative direction) in trophic egg abundance as one of the female provisioning traits in order to examine the realized heritability for this trait. But no significant difference in the average value between two strains, which were selected for each direction of trophic egg abundance, was detected. It is possible that this could have been caused by genetic depletion of the laboratory population that has been already reared for over 50 generations from the wild population. Alternatively, we in turn tried to quantify the cost and benefit of both trophic egg production and seed provisioning behavior, and investigated a tradeoff between some parental care traits in order to evaluate evolutionary adaptation of parental care traits at the phenotypic level. Then, we achieved significant results in this study.