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

理论表明，在某些动物物种中，父母和后代之间可能存在利益冲突。父母试图根据自己的最大健康水平来决定育儿投入的分配，而孩子则试图操纵父母来最大化自己的健康水平。这样的冲突可能会导致一种进化的解决方案，包括父母的照顾特征和后代的乞讨特征之间的共同适应。然而，这两个性状的遗传变异仍有待于明确认识。因此，通过选择实验，本研究的目的是提供证据，证明在亚社会的圆顶天牛的父母照料特征和后代乞讨特征中确实存在遗传变异，并检验这些特征的遗传力。我们先后选择了一个实验种群朝着营养卵丰度增加(正方向)或降低(负方向)的方向作为雌性供应性状之一，以检验这一性状的实现遗传力。但在营养卵丰度的各个方向上选择的两个菌株之间的平均值没有显著差异。这可能是由于实验室种群的基因枯竭造成的，而实验室种群已经从野生种群中饲养了50多代。或者，我们试图量化营养产卵和种子供应行为的成本和收益，并调查一些亲本照顾特性之间的权衡，以便在表型水平上评估亲本照顾特性的进化适应。然后，我们在本研究中取得了显著的成果。

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.