Parental provisioning drives brain size in birds

Significance

The young of large-brained species, if left to grow their own brain, would face a seemingly insurmountable energetic constraint, because brain tissue is energetically costly but adequate cognitive benefits arise only after a delay. We therefore hypothesize that protracted parental provisioning was a precondition for the evolution of large brains. Comparative analyses of 1,176 bird species confirmed that parental provisioning strongly predicts variation in relative brain size, suggesting that these two traits coevolved. These results provide an explanation for the well-known but so far unexplained difference in relative brain size between altricial and precocial birds. They also cast doubt on the explanatory value of previously considered social or technological cognitive abilities, suggesting we rethink our approach to cognitive evolution.

Abstract

Large brains support numerous cognitive adaptations and therefore may appear to be highly beneficial. Nonetheless, the high energetic costs of brain tissue may have prevented the evolution of large brains in many species. This problem may also have a developmental dimension: juveniles, with their immature and therefore poorly performing brains, would face a major energetic hurdle if they were to pay for the construction of their own brain, especially in larger-brained species. Here, we explore the possible role of parental provisioning for the development and evolution of adult brain size in birds. A comparative analysis of 1,176 bird species shows that various measures of parental provisioning (precocial vs. altricial state at hatching, relative egg mass, time spent provisioning the young) strongly predict relative brain size across species. The parental provisioning hypothesis also provides an explanation for the well-documented but so far unexplained pattern that altricial birds have larger brains than precocial ones. We therefore conclude that the evolution of parental provisioning allowed species to overcome the seemingly insurmountable energetic constraint on growing large brains, which in turn enabled bird species to increase survival and population stability. Because including adult eco- and socio-cognitive predictors only marginally improved the explanatory value of our models, these findings also suggest that the traditionally assessed cognitive abilities largely support successful parental provisioning. Our results therefore indicate that the cognitive adaptations underlying successful parental provisioning also provide the behavioral flexibility facilitating reproductive success and survival.