Full compensation of parental care after partner loss in an annelid

In species with biparental care, each parent would benefit by exploiting its partner and reduce its investment over offspring care. The conflict is especially apparent when one parent deserts or reduces its investment, forcing the remaining parent to either abandon the brood or compensate for the loss of partner-care effort; however, compensation is expected to be partial for the evolutionary stability of biparental care. We investigated the level of parental care compensation in the simultaneously hermaphroditic annelid worm, Ophryotrocha diadema, where both parents care for egg clutches. We removed one parent and found that widowed parents fully compensated for the loss of their partner; the number of scan observations widows spent in clutch attendance was statistically equivalent to that of paired parents. Consistently, individually, widowed parents attended their clutch significantly more often than focal worms among paired parents. We discuss how full compensation can be compatible..., , # Data from: Full compensation of parental care after partner loss in an annelid

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.bg79cnppm](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bg79cnppm)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: individual_clutch_attendance.csv

**Description:** The file contains the data collected during the lab experiment on compensation for partner loss in parental care in the annelid *Ophryotrocha diadema*, a marine worm with biparental care. As the number of behavioral observation scans varied among paired and widow worms, the data sheet contains empty cells (indicated with \"NA\").

##### Variables

* ID: code of identification of the 213 pairs
* developmental.environment: factor with two levels (Competitive environment/Non competitive environment).

This variable describes the two developmental regimes the experimental worms experienced before entering the experiment: 1) lab mass cultures (200-300 worms in 200 mL water), where worms experience hi...,