More parental care leads to higher offspring fitness, but more carers do not: an experimental study in burying beetles

Various forms of cooperation during breeding are widespread within and across animal species. The benefits of helping behaviour, such as raising the young of other conspecifics, are well studied in cooperative breeding systems, where kin selection plays a role. However, for communal breeding consisting of multiple, unrelated individuals with shared reproduction, such benefits and the impact of parental care remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we experimentally investigated the combined effects of communal breeding and parental care on reproductive success and offspring traits, and examined reproductive shares in communal groups through parentage analysis, using the burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides. These beetles can breed as pairs or together in communal groups and provide care to their larvae during the pre- and post-hatching periods. We subjected beetle individuals to communal or pair-breeding on a single carcass, manipulating the parental treatment by allowing larvae ..., The experiments were performed at the University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands. All details of experimental protocols were shown in the methodology of Ma, L. et al. (2024) More parental care leads to higher offspring fitness, but more carers do not: an experimental study in burying beetles. These data were generated according to the Ethics Committee of the University of Groningen.
Experiment: Effects of breeding system and parental care on offspring number and size
To test the combined effects of the breeding system and the degree of parental care on offspring number and size, we conducted a manipulation experiment, by creating different breeding systems (communal vs pair breeding) and allowing larvae to develop in the presence or absence of post-hatching care (full-care vs. half-care). At the end of the experimentation, reproductive success, and offspring traits were recorded., , # Data from: More parental care leads to higher offspring fitness, but more carers do not: an experimental study in burying beetles

## GENERAL INFORMATION

1. Author Information
* Corresponding Investigator
Name: Dr Long Ma
Institution: Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES), University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) and [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])
* Co-investigator 1
Name: Joris Damhuis
Institution: Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES), University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
* Co-investigator 2
Name: Prof Dr Jan Komdeur
Institution: University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands
2. Date of data collection: 2018-2020
3. Geographic location of data collection: Groningen, the Netherlands
4. Recommended citation for this dataset: Ma, L. et al. (2024), Data from: More parental care leads to higher offsprin...