takeout gene expression is associated with temporal kin recognition

Abstract

A key component of parental care is avoiding killing and eating your own offspring. Many organisms commit infanticide but switch to parental care at the time when their own offspring would be expected, known as temporal kin recognition. It is unclear how such indirect kin recognition is so common across taxa. One possibility is that temporal kin recognition can be achieved by altering a simple mechanism, such as co-opting the regulation of timing and feeding in other contexts. Here we determine whether takeout, a gene implicated in coordinating feeding, influences temporal kin recognition in the roundneck sexton beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis. We find that takeout expression is not associated with non-parental feeding changes resulting from hunger, or in the general switch to the full parental care repertoire. However, beetles that accepted and provided care to their offspring had a higher takeout expression than beetles that committed infanticide. Together, these data support the idea that the evolution of temporal kin recognition may be enabled by co-option of mechanisms that integrate feeding behaviour in other contexts.