Scientists in Cambridge have found cracks in the long-standing theory that the number of eggs animals have and the size of those eggs is related to how much parental care they invest in their offspring.
Humans, like other mammals, have relatively few offspring into which they invest an immense amount of effort. In cold-blooded animals such as fish and amphibians, however, eggs vary greatly in size and number. Evidence suggests that parental care and producing larger eggs go hand-in-hand, a university release said. But a new analysis of reproductive strategies in insects by Dr James Gilbert and Dr Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge shows that this relationship does not hold in the insect world.
According to Dr Gilbert, “Our results are wholly unexpected. We found that, regardless of how much effort insect species invest in parental care, the relative size of their eggs did not change.
This means we may have to reassess our ideas about how caring for offspring affects their size.” When they looked at relationships between egg numbers and parental care in insects, they found even more surprising results. “In insects that do not care for their eggs, we found that the larger the insect, the more eggs they have.”