Maternal care shapes an aposematic display and provides lifelong protection against predators.

Abstract

Parental care can improve early offspring survival against predators by providing protection and resources. However, we have little knowledge of how its effects shape predator-prey interactions later in life. We investigated this with the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides which provides care for offspring and carries warning coloration to advertise its chemical defenses to predators. Warning displays by prey are selected by predators for uniformity and to reliably advertise the extent to which individuals are chemically defended. We investigated whether the strength of the correlation between the conspicuousness of the warning display and the potency of the chemical defenses depends on levels of care received during development by manipulating the level of maternal care received by larvae and tracking the effects into adulthood. We found that individuals that received limited care, developed into smaller adults with less conspicuous warning displays. The correlation between the visual display and the chemical defense was also weaker when broods received little care as larvae. We conclude that maternal care received by burying beetles modulates the information content of aposematic defense: less care makes signals less reliable. Our results further suggest that the prey's social environment could constrain the response to selection from predators on warning signal reliability.