Parent–offspring conflict and co-adaptation: behavioural ecology meets quantitative genetics

Abstract

The evolution of the complex and dynamic behavioural interactions between caring parents and their dependent offspring is a major area of research in behavioural ecology and quantitative genetics. While behavioural ecologists examine the evolution of interactions between parents and offspring in the light of parent-offspring conflict and its resolution, quantitative geneticists explore the evolution of such interactions in the light of parent-offspring co-adaptation due to combined effects of parental and offspring behaviours on fitness. To date, there is little interaction or integration between these two fields. Here, we first review the merits and limitations of each of these two approaches and show that they provide important complementary insights into the evolution of strategies for offspring begging and parental resource provisioning. We then outline how central ideas from behavioural ecology and quantitative genetics can be combined within a framework based on the concept of behavioural reaction norms, which provides a common basis for behavioural ecologists and quantitative geneticists to study the evolution of parent-offspring interactions. Finally, we discuss how the behavioural reaction norm approach can be used to advance our understanding of parent-offspring conflict by combining information about the genetic basis of traits from quantitative genetics with key insights regarding the adaptive function and dynamic nature of parental and offspring behaviours from behavioural ecology.

We were all young once: an intragenomic perspective on parent–offspring conflict

“…As always, solving the conflict would require additional assumptions. A resolution model of our battleground portrayal could be conceived by incorporating signalling [3,5,17] or developmental limits imposed on the form of the demand and supply function [11,18,19].…”

“…The specific behavioural traits underlying POC are best understood as reaction norms [11]. This is why our model assumes parents to express supply function genes that regulate resource supply to offspring and that offspring express demand function genes that regulate resource demand from parents [12].…”

Applying a quantitative genetics framework to behavioural syndrome research

“…Reaction norms are particularly relevant to the study of behaviours as they are often labile, and thus responses often vary greatly with environmental and social conditions (Smiseth et al 2008). Dingemanse et al (2010a,b) suggested that the general framework for describing reaction norms provided by quantitative genetics could be extended to those behaviours observed as components of behavioural syndromes.…”

The Strategies of the Genes: Genomic Conflicts, Attachment Theory, and Development of the Social Brain

“…Outcomes of conflict between individuals, and between sets of genes, are difficult to predict, but may include stable equilibria, tugs-or-war over resource allocation, one party 'winning' due to asymmetries in control over resource allocation, or continued conflict (e. g., Royle et al 2004;Smiseth et al 2008). Conflicts such as genomic imprinting also potentiate liability to phenotypes associated with disease (Crespi 2010), due to functional haploidy of imprinted genes, dysregulation of tug-of-war based systems that evolved in this context, and the expected general higher lability of epigenetic gene-expression control systems (based on methylation and histone modifications) compared to the lability of DNA alterations via mutation.…”