Offspring overcome poor parenting by being better parents

The evolutionary repercussions of parental effects—the impact of the developmental environment provided by parents on offspring—are often discussed as static effects that can have negative influences on offspring fitness that may even persist across generations. However, individuals are not passive recipients and may mitigate the persistence of parental effects through their behaviour. Here, we tested how the burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis, a species with complex parental care, responded to poor parenting. We cross-fostered young manipulated the duration of parental care received and measured the impact on traits of both F1 and F2 offspring to experimentally extricate the effect of poor parenting from other parental effects. As expected, reducing parental care negatively affected traits that are ecologically important for burying beetles, including F1 offspring development time and body size. However, F1 parents who received reduced care as larvae spent more time feeding F2 offs..., We conducted manipulations of the developmental environment by providing some beetles with reduced post-hatching parental care (6 hours) or full post-hatching parental care (7-9 days). We determined how reducing parental care influenced the duration of developmental stages, survival, larval mass, and adult body size. We then determined how the developmental experience of these larvae in adulthood - those that received full or reduced care - influenced the same traits of their offspring when these individuals became parents. We further determined how developmental experience impacted parental care behavior when young became parents themselves., , # Offspring overcome poor parenting by being better parents in *Nicrophorus orbicollis*

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In this study, we manipulated the duration of parental care that young of the burying beetle *Nicrophorus orbicollis* received, such that beetles received full (7-9 days) or reduced (six hours) parental care. These data include the impact of full or reduced care on offspring development and life history (\"F1 Parental Family Data\"), and also how manipulating the parental care that beetles received impacted their behavior when they reached adulthood and the impact on the development of F2 offspring (\"F2 Life History and Parental Care Conditions\").

## Description of the Data and file structure

### **F1 Parental Family Data**

This dataset includes the effects of manipulating the duration of parental care received (full or reduced) on the development and life history of *Nicrophorus orbicollis*. Data are provided as both an Excel and a CSV file to increase accessibility.

Explanation of empty cel...