Parents will fret, even among bugs. And even among bugs, it’s complicated.
Ferociously protective parenting has evolved four times among the pointy-faced, wide-bodied little leaf dwellers called shield bugs, researchers report in the May Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society. Those shifts from zero to all-in helicopter parenting affected egg shape, analysis of 30 species shows.
For the new study, behavioral and evolutionary ecologist Shin-ichi Kudo and colleagues watched shield bugs (Acanthosomatidae), measured over 1,400 eggs and considered the insects’ evolutionary tree. Attentive parenting didn’t make much of an impact for species with the biggest eggs, which generally stayed round, the analysis shows. For the rest of the species,