The adaptive role of parental care to environmental changes

As environments shift rapidly under climate change, animals may respond through dispersal, plasticity, or evolutionary adaptation. But are these responses sufficient — and do they come at a cost? We investigate how burying beetles cope with thermal stress across generations, and how these responses interact with their social environment.

Using experimental evolution, we test whether burying beetles can track rising temperatures over successive generations, and whether the presence or absence of parental care alters their evolutionary trajectory. Complementing this, we have found that heat stress effects on offspring are not confined to a single life stage but compound across the period of parental care — parents exposed to thermal stress produce offspring that suffer further when they themselves experience heat during development (Malik et al. 2025 Proc B). Parents can behaviourally buffer their offspring against warming, but this plasticity imposes somatic costs on the caring adults themselves (Hsu et al., in revision, npj Biodiversity), suggesting that parental compensation may not be sustainable under chronic warming.

Together, these lines of work ask: can adaptation and plasticity keep pace with environmental change, and what are the hidden costs when they do?

This work is led by Jeff, Teddy, with contributions from collaborators across multiple systems.