Data and code from: Parental care liberates juvenile growth: A common-garden test of the evolutionary benefits of care

Effects on juvenile growth have long been considered an important benefit
of parental care, but they have rarely been tested empirically. Protection
and feeding by parents might accelerate offspring growth by allowing
offspring to allocate more resources to growth (resource-allocation
hypothesis). Protected young could shift investment away from defensive
adaptations towards growth (defensive reallocation), and parental feeding
should increase the total amount of assimilated resources (energy intake).
Alternatively, rapid growth can be costly due to damage caused by reactive
oxygen species, and parental protection might facilitate slower growth to
avoid this (costly-acceleration hypothesis). We tested these hypotheses
along with the suggestion that egg and adult size are correlated with
growth in a common-garden study of 17 species of Silphinae. Our results
were consistent with the resource-allocation hypothesis but did not
support the costly-acceleration hypothesis or the idea that egg or adult
size constrains growth. Species that are normally protected by parents
grew faster, not slower, than those that are not. This was true even when
their parents were removed and could not feed, supporting the concept of
defensive reallocation. As expected based on greater energy intake, the
young of species with parental feeding grew faster when their parents were
present than when they were not. When phylogeny was accounted for, neither
egg nor adult size were related to early growth rate.