# "Both sexes pay a cost of reproduction in a frog with biparental care"



## ryangreenway (Apr 30, 2010)

My advisor's friend recently published this cool study about the costs of biparental care in _O. pumilio_ and I thought it might be appreciated here. 

"The assumption that reproduction is costly is central to life-history theory. Good evidence supporting this premise comes from studies, mostly in short-lived invertebrates, demonstrating a negative relationship between reproduction and longevity. Whether this trade-off operates broadly, for example in males and females and in short- and long-lived organisms, remains unresolved. We found a negative relationship between reproduction and days survived in captive, wild-caught, individuals of a long-lived poison frog with biparental care (Oophaga pumilio). The proportion of time that individuals spent paired and tadpole production rate were negatively associated with days survived in both sexes, and clutch production was negatively associated with days survived in females. These results broaden the taxonomic base upon which this tenet of life-history theory is built, empirically confirm that females of this species should be choosy when selecting mates and caring for offspring, and suggest that the costs of ‘limited’ male care in this species deserve re-evaluation."

Dugas, M. B., Wamelink, C. N. and Richards-Zawacki, C. L. (2015), Both sexes pay a cost of reproduction in a frog with biparental care. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. doi: 10.1111/bij.12461

Both sexes pay a cost of reproduction in a frog with biparental care - Dugas - 2015 - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society - Wiley Online Library


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## phender (Jan 9, 2009)

I must admit that I only read the abstract, but I would think that the negative impact on the life span of the male might have more to do with the stress of continuous courting behavior than any parental care given by the male.
Since the female is always in close proximity in a captive situation, the male is courting almost all the time. This is likely not true in the wild.

Sorry is all this is covered in the paper.


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## ryangreenway (Apr 30, 2010)

phender said:


> I must admit that I only read the abstract, but I would think that the negative impact on the life span of the male might have more to do with the stress of continuous courting behavior than any parental care given by the male.
> Since the female is always in close proximity in a captive situation, the male is courting almost all the time. This is likely not true in the wild.
> 
> Sorry is all this is covered in the paper.


I've just gotten around to reading the entire thing, but they do address this:

"To test for costly repro-duction in O. pumilio, we followed the reproduction ofwild-caught frogs held in captivity, and asked howthree proxies for reproductive activity were associatedwith the length of time individuals survived: (i) theproportion of time paired (vs. held without a mate),(ii) rate of clutch production, and (iii) tadpole produc-tion. If reproduction is costly, all three metrics shouldbe negatively associated with captive longevity,although the effects might differ between the sexes.The metric ‘proportion-of-time paired’ captures thecosts of courtship to males and those females pay forinteracting with males (e.g., Magurran & Seghers,1994). While clutch production might reflect highercosts of successful male courtship (i.e. mating), weexpect this metric to be particularly costly for femalesbecause they produce the eggs (Williams, 2005).We operationally defined tadpoles as the numbertransported to rearing sites (Dugas, Yeager &Richards-Zawacki, 2013), so this metric capturespotentially costly parental behaviours for both sexes(egg tending, tadpole transport, tadpole feeding), butis again assumed to be much more costly for females(Summers et al., 1997)."
Dugas et al. 2015


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## Dendrobait (May 29, 2005)

I wonder how big the difference is?

Also I find that calling seems to lessen when frogs are not sprayed...during an imposed rest period


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