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Citizen science data from popular platform iNaturalist has helped uncover the evolution of parental guarding behaviour in harvestmen, as shown in research published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Combining nearly three decades of fieldwork with data from iNaturalist, an international team of researchers led by a scientist from the University of São Paulo have more than doubled the number of documented cases of parental care in harvestmen. As a result, the evolution of maternal and paternal care in the superfamily Gonyleptoidea was reconstructed for the first time.
The study has found that parental guarding behaviour has evolved, disappeared, and then re-emerged several times throughout the evolutionary history of harvestmen. By mapping this behaviour, researchers found that maternal care evolved only from no care, a pattern also seen in insects. However, paternal care was shown to evolve from either no care or from maternal care, suggesting different selection pressures were at play. The researchers theorised that when paternal care evolved from maternal care, it is likely evidence of a sexually selected behaviour; a hypothesis known as ‘enhanced fecundity’.
