Parental care is common throughout the animal kingdom and among caring species there is a bewildering variation in how parents care for offspring, as well as in the amount of resources parents invest in care. For instance, there is considerable variation in the relative parental investment by the sexes – in some species females invest more, in others males invest more, and in some investment is more or less equally shared. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain patterns of parental investment between the sexes, as well as among species, and work is still ongoing to develop an overarching hypothesis that can explain the various patterns observed

Peer reviewed