Impacts of Parental Care Quality on Tadpole Development

Offspring communication to parents is crucial for survival in many altricial animal species. Mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) tadpoles rely on their parents for nutritional needs. This biparental species coordinates sex-specific parenting tasks through vocal communication, including guarding, transportation, and feeding. Tadpoles solicit maternal provisioning of unfertilized egg meals by begging using bodily vibrations directed at a caregiver. Whether tadpoles selectively recognize their parents or display begging to any potential caregiver remains poorly understood. To test this, we exposed R. imitator tadpoles to related and unrelated males and females and measured affiliative behavior towards caregivers versus conspecifics. First, we found that offspring care relies on interparental synchrony and that the degree of synchrony between parents impacts how often tadpoles receive care. Second, I found that investment shapes caregiver preference. Highly invested tadpoles beg more to their biological mothers than to unrelated female caregivers, and tadpoles that experience less or no care lose this preference. Across all investment types, tadpoles exhibit no preference for biological fathers compared to male conspecifics. Additionally, tadpoles with more invested parents were more active around a novel stimulus. Together, my data indicate that the quality of parental investment drives parent recognition and preference, and high parental investment produces bolder tadpoles. Next, I aimed to identify what parts of the brain are most plastic in response to parental investment. I am currently examining the cellular makeup across brain regions in highly invested, lowly invested, and no investment tadpoles using immunohistochemistry to determine levels of neurogenesis across socially relevant brain regions. These experiments fill an essential gap in our understanding of how parental decisions impact the underlying mechanisms of offspring behavior that determine their survival rate.