Parental niche construction buffers microbial and competitive challenges and drives offspring dependence in burying beetles.

Abstract

Parents across diverse taxa modify the biotic or abiotic environments of their offspring. Such modifications may constitute ecological inheritance and are central to developmental niche construction, whereby organisms shape developmental conditions and selective pressures experienced by the next generation. Despite its theoretical importance, parental niche construction is often studied under simplified conditions or by focusing on single components of care, limiting our understanding of how multiple parental modifications interact in ecologically relevant contexts, whether they buffer environmental heterogeneity, and how this shapes offspring development and evolutionary trajectories. Using the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, we investigated how parents jointly modify chemical and microbial properties of vertebrate carcasses, a highly contested resource on which offspring develop. We show that under natural microbial and competitive conditions, prehatch care enhances larval survival and growth, alters cadaveric volatile emissions, and reduces carcass attractiveness to competitors. While soil type shapes carcass-associated microbial communities, parental care buffers these environmental effects, creating a more consistent microbiome and reducing environmentally induced larval mortality. Larvae of the related species Ptomascopus morio, which lacks prehatch carcass preparation, survived equally well on prepared and unmodified carcasses, whereas N. vespilloides larvae showed reduced survival on unmodified carcasses. This contrast is consistent with the hypothesis that N. vespilloides larvae have evolved a reliance on a parentally constructed developmental environment. Together, these findings show that parental care can constitute an integrated form of niche construction that reshapes developmental environments, enhances offspring performance, and may promote evolutionary feedback leading to increased offspring dependence on parental care.