Meeting Abstract
The intense and often elaborate behaviors that encompass parental care are remarkable and require the coordination of hormonal, neural, and molecular changes, many of which remain poorly understood. The biological mechanisms promoting parental care are best characterized in mammals, but smaller, simpler brain and a diversity of parental care strategies in non-mammalian species may provide critical insights into the evolution of parental care. Maternal care has evolved multiple times in amphibians, including in some Malagasy Mantella and South American Dendobrates poison frogs. Although these lineages diverged over 150 million years ago, there are striking similarities in maternal behavior, where in some species females provision developing tadpoles with unfertilized trophic eggs. Moreover, both frog clades are toxic and trophic eggs laced with alkaloid toxins may serve to protect as well as nourish tadpoles. We take advantage of convergent evolution in two poison frog species to ask whether (1) the neural and physiological mechanisms mediating parental care are similar across independent transitions to provisioning behavior and whether (2) both species provide alkaloid toxins to tadpoles through trophic egg feeding. Our work sheds light on the neuroendocrine factors that promote maternal care in amphibians and allows us to determine if the remarkable convergence of maternal egg across lineages relies on similar underlying mechanisms that facilitate both provisioning and protection of offspring.
