The pay-offs of maternal care increase as offspring develop, favouring extended provisioning in an egg-feeding frog

Offspring quantity and quality are components of parental fitness that cannot be maximized simultaneously. When the benefits of investing in offspring quality decline, parents are expected to shift investment towards offspring quantity (other reproductive opportunities). Even when mothers retain complete control of resource allocation, offspring control whether to allocate investment to growth or development towards independence, and this shared control may generate parent-offspring conflict over the duration of care. We examined these predictions by, in a captive colony, experimentally removing tadpoles of the strawberry poison frog (Oophaga pumilio) from the mothers that provision them with trophic eggs throughout development. Tadpoles removed from their mothers were no less likely to survive to nutritional independence (i.e. through metamorphosis) than were those that remained with their mothers, but these offspring were smaller at metamorphosis and were less likely to survive to reach adult size, even though they were fed ad libitum. Tadpoles that remained with their mothers developed more slowly than those not receiving care, a pattern that might suggest that offspring extracted more care than was in mothers' best interests. However, the fitness returns of providing care increased with offspring development, suggesting that mothers would be best off continuing care until tadpoles initiated metamorphosis. Although the benefits of parental investment in offspring quality are often thought to asymptote at high levels, driving parent-offspring conflict over weaning, this assumption may not hold over natural ranges of investment, with selection on both parents and offspring favouring extended durations of parental care.