Reproductive Strategies in Insects

Providing care to offspring is a costly, but effective strategy of parents to increase the fitness of their descendants.In insects, parental care has repeatedly evolved in a wide range of taxa.It can take a great diversity of forms, occur at different times during offspring development, last from a few minutes to several years and involve either the mother, the father or both parents.In this chapter, we detail the astounding diversity of parental care in insects.We start by presenting forms of parental care that occur before oviposition, then move to forms occurring between oviposition and egg hatching and conclude with forms of post-hatching parental care occurring before and/or after nutritional independence.This comprehensive review demonstrates overall insects represent a perfect example of the diversity of parental care that can be found in animals, and thus emphasizes why they are excellent biological models for improving our general understanding of its evolution, diversification and underlying physiological and genetic mechanisms.