Counting marmots…
The burying beetle species Nicrophorus investigator employs elaborate parental care strategies, choosing to parent either biparentally or uniparentally. The type of parenting style and their breeding environment can be manipulated to ask questions about this species’ reproductive success under various climatic conditions. N. investigator has been known to preferentially breed in open meadows as compared to aspen or spruce forests. Increasingly arid conditions in this species local environment have increased their risk of desiccation, caused more frequent extreme temperatures and limited the availability of carcass resources. All of these threats are exacerbated in the meadow habitat, suggesting it may no longer be an ideal breeding environment. Biparental and uniparental treatments were set up in both a shaded aspen grove and an open sunny meadow at 2,900 m in the Rocky Mountains. Each replicate was evaluated daily to monitor abiotic factors including soil moisture and temperature levels, as well as various measures of reproductive success. Overall breeding success was higher in the aspen than the adjacent meadow habitat and broods reared in the aspen had significantly higher numbers of larvae, and higher total brood masses. This indicates that the shaded forest environment provided better conditions for reproductive success than the meadow, their previously preferred breeding habitat. There was no significant effect of parenting strategy in any treatment, signifying that parents are responding similarly to environmental stressors and that biparental care did not compensate for the poorer conditions occurring in the meadow habitat.
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