The evolutionary demise of a social interaction: experimentally induced loss of traits involved in the supply and demand of care

Bladon, Eleanor K., Pascoal, Sonia, Bird, Nancy, Mashoodh, Rahia and Kilner, Rebecca M. (2023) The evolutionary demise of a social interaction: experimentally induced loss of traits involved in the supply and demand of care. Evolution Letters, 7 (3). pp. 168-175. ISSN 2056-3744

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Abstract

Phenotypic plasticity enables animals to adjust their behavior flexibly to their social environment—sometimes through the expression of adaptive traits that have not been exhibited for several generations. We investigated how long social adaptations can usefully persist when they are not routinely expressed, by using experimental evolution to document the loss of social traits associated with the supply and demand of parental care. We allowed populations of burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides to evolve in two different social environments for 48 generations in the lab. In “Full Care” populations, traits associated with the supply and demand of parental care were expressed at every generation, whereas in “No Care” populations we prevented expression of these traits experimentally. We then revived trait expression in the No Care populations at generations 24, 43, and 48 by allowing parents to supply post-hatching care and compared these social traits with those expressed by the Full Care populations. We found that offspring demands for care and male provision of care in the No Care populations were lost sooner than female provision of care. We suggest that this reflects differences in the strength of selection for the expression of alternative traits in offspring, males and females, which can enhance fitness when post-hatching care is disrupted.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The data referred to in this article are openly available on Dryad at doi:10.5061/dryad.r4xgxd2jd
Uncontrolled Keywords:	experimental evolution,nicrophorus vespilloides,parental care,social evolution,trait loss,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,genetics ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	16 Mar 2026 12:30
Last Modified:	20 Mar 2026 01:21
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102340
DOI:	10.1093/evlett/qrad016

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