Inbreeding reduces the ability of young to exploit high-resource nurseries

Parents of many species create a “nursery” in which young develop, and variation in this environment can influence offspring phenotype and fitness. Recent studies have demonstrated that behavioral interactions within these nurseries may moderate inbreeding depression. However, whether other features of the nursery impact inbreeding depression, either directly or through secondary impacts on behavior, has been less well studied. Here, I describe two experiments involving the burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis, in which I test (1) whether inbreeding depression is sensitive to the size of the carcass that constitutes the nursery, and (2) whether inbreeding and carcass size influence parental care behavior. In the first experiment, I found that resource abundance in the nursery impacted inbreeding depression in larval mass, a trait that determines adult body size and competitive ability. In low-resource nurseries, inbred and outbred offspring did not differ in mass. However, in high-res..., , , # Inbreeding reduces the ability of young to exploit high-resource nurseries

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w3r22811b](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w3r22811b)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: experiment.1.data.csv

**Description:** Data from the 1st experiment.

##### Variables

* pair: a unique identifier for the breeding pair
* inbreeding: the inbreeding treatment (i =inbred, o =outbred)
* carcass: the carcass size treatment (large or small)
* carc.mass: the carcass mass in grams
* m.fam: the male family of origin
* f.fam: the female family of origin
* eggs.max: the maximum number of eggs observed through the bottom of the breeding box (an estimate of clutch size).
* brood.size: the number of larvae at dispersal
* eclosed.adults: the number of adults that survived to eclosion
* brood.mass: the total mass of the larvae at dispersal
* mean.mass: the mean mass of dispersing larvae (brood.mass/brood.size)

- prop.eclosed: the proportion...,