Trophic egg‐laying–wherein mothers provide non‐developing eggs for offspring to eat–has
attracted much empirical attention to diverse taxa (eg amphibians, non‐social and eusocial …

Parental care is extremely diverse but, despite much research, why parental care evolves is
poorly understood. Here we address this outstanding question using egg attendance, the …

Communal egg-laying is widespread among animals, occurring in insects, mollusks, fish,
amphibians, reptiles, and birds, just to name a few. While some benefits of communal egg …

It has long been recognized that among invertebrates and cold-blooded vertebrates egg
size is often positively correlated with the amount of parental care afforded the developing …

The trade-off between offspring size and number is central to life history strategies. Both the
evolutionary gain of parental care or more favorable habitats for offspring development are …

Understanding what regulates population sizes of organisms with complex life cycles is
challenging because limits on population sizes can occur at any stage or transition. We …

Adaptive within-clutch allocation of resources by laying females is an important focus of
evolutionary studies. However, the critical assumption of these studies, namely that within …

Traditionally, maternal effects have been treated as a source of troublesome environmental
variance that confounds our ability to accurately estimate the genetic basis of the traits of …

In this paper, we develop a series of models for predicting optimal egg size and clutch size
in different environments and for different maternal phenotypes. The models investigate the …

Hypotheses regarding the evolution and maintenance of intraspecific nest parasitism were
tested with data collected during a 3-year study of common eiders (Somateria mollissima) …