Clever mothers balance time and effort in parental care: a study on free-ranging dogs - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2017 Jan 11;4(1):160583.

doi: 10.1098/rsos.160583. eCollection 2017 Jan.

Affiliations

Clever mothers balance time and effort in parental care: a study on free-ranging dogs

Manabi Paul et al. R Soc Open Sci. 2017.

Abstract

Mammalian offspring require parental care, at least in the form of nursing during their early development. While mothers need to invest considerable time and energy in ensuring the survival of their current offspring, they also need to optimize their investment in one batch of offspring in order to ensure future reproduction and hence lifetime reproductive success. Free-ranging dogs live in small social groups, mate promiscuously and lack the cooperative breeding biology of other group-living canids. They face high early-life mortality, which in turn reduces fitness benefits of the mother from a batch of pups. We carried out a field-based study on free-ranging dogs in India to understand the nature of maternal care. Our analysis reveals that mothers reduce investment in energy-intensive active care and increase passive care as the pups grow older, thereby keeping overall levels of care more or less constant over pup age. Using the patterns of mother-pup interactions, we define the different phases of maternal care behaviour.

Keywords: free-ranging dogs; ontogeny; parental care; parental investment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Three-dimensional graphical representation of the combined effect of pup age and current litter size on the active care shown by the mother. (a) Three-dimensional scatter plot showing the mother's perspective of care provided to the whole litter, at different ages, and for different litter sizes. (b) Three-dimensional surface plot showing the proportion of active care received by individual pups at various ages and for different litter sizes. The dark green areas depict the least and the dark red areas the maximum, levels of active care per pup.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Scatter plot showing that as the pups grow older, the mothers strike a balance between the proportion of time spent in active and passive care towards their pups by decreasing the first and increasing the latter. Each dot represents a mother of a mother–litter unit. Each solid black dot represents the proportion of passive care shown by each mother, whereas each empty circle represents the proportion of active care shown by each mother.

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Stacked bar diagram showing that the mothers distribute their time unequally among the various active care behaviours. The mothers reduce their investment in behaviours like nursing, allogrooming and piling up with pups and invest more time in play and protective behaviours with increasing pup age.

Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Box-whisker plots showing the rate (frequency per hour) of active care shown by the mothers towards their pups over increasing pup age. (a) Rate of nursing, (b) rate of allogrooming, (c) rate of regurgitation, (d) rate of food offering, (e) rate of den cleaning by eating the faecal matter of pups, (f) rate of protection, (g) rate of suckling being refused by the mother and (h) the rate of play interactions between mother and pups over increased pup ages.

Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Bar diagram showing (a) the preference shown by the mother while she nurses her pups and (b) the preference shown by the mother while she allogrooms her pups. Asterisk indicates statistically significant difference (p < 0.05).

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Clutton-Brock T (ed.).. 1991. The evolution of parental care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    1. Woodroffe R, Vincent A. 1994. Mother's little helpers: patterns of male care in mammals. Trends Ecol. Evol. 9, 294–297. (doi:10.1016/0169-5347(94)90033-7) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Evans RM. 1990. The relationship between parental input and investment. Anim. Behav. 39, 797–798.
    1. Roff D (ed.).. 1993. Evolution of life histories: theory and analysis. Berlin, Germany: Springer Science and Business Media.
    1. Stearns S. 1992. The evolution of life histories. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

LinkOut - more resources