Parental Care
Parental care is an evolutionary strategy used to increase the odds of offspring survival. Parental care covers a wide range of behaviours such as incubation, food provisioning and protection from predators. This form of care is seen in organisms from many phyla and across all continents. Parental care is adaptive and beneficial to both parents and offspring. It increases the survival and reproductive success of both parents and offspring, increases the quality of offspring, decreases the amount of energy invested in reproduction, and enhances the fitness of the species. This serves as an important mechanism in many species’ reproductive ‘survival’ and therefore parental care is a key element in understanding population dynamics and species evolution.
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