“The Caring Crustacean”: An Overview of Crustacean Parental Care

Abstract

Abstract Many crustacean species are known to provide parental care, with behaviors ranging from ventilating the eggs to providing food for young. This chapter provides an overview of parental care patterns across crustaceans, and then compares crustacean parental care to that of select other taxa (insects, fishes, frogs) that share important traits with crustaceans (exoskeleton, aquatic or amphibious lifestyle, respectively). The aim is to identify gaps in the understanding of the evolution of parental care in crustaceans. We show that nearly all crustaceans provide parental care for early embryos (eggs), while caring for advanced stages is rarer. The most common forms of care are simple behaviors (e.g. fanning and cleaning behaviors), while complex behaviors (e.g. feeding the young) evolved exclusively in groups that also care for longer. Caring is most frequently done by females, while biparental is rare, and exclusive paternal care is nonexistent. When compared across taxa, simple behaviors are also the most common forms of care, and reasons for the evolution of parental care have common themes. First, parental care enhances offspring survival. In crustaceans, early embryo/egg mortality is apparently high, which might have triggered the evolution of parental care in several crustacean taxa independently. Second, crustaceans that have large eggs and inhabit stable habitats tend to care for longer. Lastly, internal fertilization seems to prevent male crustaceans from caring by not allowing the males to access the eggs and to ensure paternity.

Topics & Concepts