1. School of Biological Sciences, IENS, University of Lancaster, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK
2. Population & Evolutionary Biology Research Group, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GS, UK
3. Present address: Division of Environmental Biology, Graham Kerr Building, Glasgow University, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.

Correspondence to: Ian R. Hartley¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to I.R.H. (e-mail: Email: i.hartley@lancaster.ac.uk).

Abstract

Parental care is often costly¹; hence, in sexually reproducing species where both male and female parents rear their offspring (biparental care), sexual conflict over parental investment can arise². Such conflict occurs because each care-giver would benefit from withholding parental investment for use with another partner, leading to a reduction in the amount of care given by one parent at the expense of the other^{3, 4, 5}. Here we report experiments to explore the prediction from theory that parents rearing offspring alone may provide greater parental investment than when rearing offspring together with a partner^{3, 5}. We found that when the number of offspring per parent, and hence the potential workload, were kept constant, offspring received a greater per capita parental investment from single females than from both parents working together, and that males reared by single mothers were more sexually attractive as adults than their biparentally reared siblings. This difference between single- and two-parent families is due to a reduction in care provided by females when they care together with a male, rather than laziness by males or differences in the begging behaviour of chicks, supporting the claim that sexual conflict in biparental care can reduce the quality of offspring raised^{3, 5}.