Additionally, parental care strategy was significantly associated with tarsus length (Table 1), so that offspring cared for by females had shorter tarsi than those cared for by males.
As egg production and offspring care are costly, females should invest resources adaptively into their eggs to optimize current offspring quality and their own lifetime reproductive success.
Moreover, socially monogamous males and females may also similarly benefit from high AOC during post-natal offspring care, which is an energetically demanding period for both sexes, as parental duties are shared almost evenly between males and females [31].
So there appears to be lineage-specific genes associated with offspring care.
Aggression may lead to elevated helper contributions to offspring care in two ways.
However, male mate choice has now been described even in species where males do not invest in offspring care [ 3- 6].
These include many behaviors closely connected to reproduction, such as mating, courtship, offspring care, and aggressive behaviors.
Hence, aggression does not seem to play a role in the context of conflict over contributions to offspring care in meerkats.
The MHH posits that reproductive division of labour evolved via reorganization of the timing of gene expression related to offspring care [ 8].
When faced with limited time and energy, compromises occur and these resources are allocated among essential activities, such as body growth, maintenance, foraging, mating, and offspring care.
