Data from: Partner cues and individual variation underlie sex-reversed parental care in poison frogs

Flexible parental care strategies are widespread in nature and factor into
conflict between the sexes and the realization of sex roles. While
adaptive explanations abound, the mechanisms underlying flexible
‘sex-reversal’ of care are less clear. We enlist a biparental frog
(Ranitomeya imitator) with flexible parental care to investigate the
extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms underpinning parental decisions. Using
mate removal experiments in the laboratory, we show that members of the
primary caregiving sex (males) show less variation than the flexible sex
(females) in their propensity to provide care, and that care propensity in
females is affected by extrinsic partner cues as well as individual
variability. Indeed, individual repeatability in parental effort is high
in both typically caregiving and flexible parents. To investigate the
underpinnings of differences in care propensity, we sequenced RNA from
whole brains of caregiving and non-caregiving frogs of both sexes. While
actively caregiving females showed minimal differential gene expression
compared to actively caregiving males, females that failed to provide care
showed distinct patterns of gene expression. Our findings offer an initial
glimpse into the environmental and genetic regulation of individual
variation in sex-reversed parental care.