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Behavioral Ecology Vol. 15 No. 3: 520-523
Behavioral Ecology vol. 15 no. 3 © International Society for Behavioral Ecology 2004; all rights reserved

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The origin of parental care in birds: a reassessment

Tomasz Wesolowski

Department of Avian Ecology, Wroclaw University, 50 335 Wroclaw, Sienkiewicza 21, Poland

Address correspondence to T. Wesolowski. E-mail: tomwes@biol.uni.wroc.pl.

Received 14 February 2003; revised 5 July 2003; accepted 17 August 2003.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   INTRODUCTION
 
Birds' reproductive biology is unique in several respects, including patterns of parental care. Biparental care is the norm in birds; it occurs in more than 90% of living species (Kendeigh, 1952Go), whereas in all other animal groups, if biparental care occurs at all, it is much less common than is uniparental paternal or maternal care (Clutton-Brock, 1991Go). The reasons for this peculiar pattern are still not fully understood. The studies on avian parental care usually assumed that biparental care was primitive in birds, and theoretical effort was concentrated on finding ways to explain how unaided male or female care could have evolved from it (references in Wesolowski, 1994Go). The problem of how this avian biparental care system has evolved in the first place was usually completely ignored. Fortunately this situation has been changing lately. Several studies pursued problems of the evolutionary origins of parental care by . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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