![]() Explaining the origin and consequences of parental sex role differences are central questions in evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology, due to their direct and significant impact on individual fitness and ultimately, their contribution to breeding system evolution ( Clutton-Brock, 1991 Kokko and Jennions, 2008 Royle et al., 2012 Kahn et al., 2013 McNamara and Wolf, 2015 Fromhage et al., 2016 Fromhage and Jennions, 2016 Henshaw et al., 2019). Parental sex role differences in terms of workload may manifest in one parent providing full care and the other providing no care at all (such as in uniparental systems), or it may manifest in unequal relative amount of care provided by the two sexes in biparental systems. Although the traditional definition of sex roles focuses on the competition aspect only, the frequent association with biased parental care and the reinforcing, positive interaction between them justifies a wider definition including parental sex roles ( Kokko and Jennions, 2008). Males and females often differ in various aspects of their reproductive behaviours, for instance, in their competitiveness and choosiness during mating and their parental behaviour, so that they exhibit distinctive sex roles ( Kokko et al., 2006 Fairbairn, 2013). Our study suggests context-specific and sexually different genetic, social and non-social environmental effects in the ontogeny of parental sex roles and outline the importance of parental negotiation in explaining individual variation of parental behaviour in biparental species. However, the strongest and most consistent effect that we found is that of the current mate a social effect that can manifest both in negative and positive directions, depending on the behavioural trait. ![]() Based on the results of our experiment, both genetic and social effects can contribute to intergenerational transmission of specific parental behaviours, with various weights. We then compared various parental behaviours (such as time spent incubating, or number of nest attendances during offspring provisioning) in the second generation to those of their genetic and social parents. These fostered birds, after becoming fully matured, received a pair randomly and we observed parental care of this second generation too, following the same protocol. Using nest box cameras, parental behaviour was recorded for 3 h in two reproductive stages: on day 8 of incubation and day 10 post-hatching. Clutches of eggs were swapped, and we monitored parental behaviours in two consecutive generations of a captive population of the socially monogamous, biparental zebra finch ( Taeniopygia guttata). ![]() Following a full cross-fostering design, here we aimed at disentangling genetic and social parental effects in the ontogeny of parental behaviours. Based on these studies, however, genetic inheritance does not account fully for the often-significant phenotypic variability observed within species, a variation that we hypothesized may be explained by social effects from parents. Parental care plays a central, reinforcing role in the evolution of sex roles and its development is often reported to be driven by genetic, rather than environmental effects.
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