The amount of care parents provide to the offspring is complicated by an evolutionary
conflict of interest ('sexual conflict') between the two parents. Recent theoretical models …

In species with biparental and cooperative brood care, multiple carers cooperate by
contributing costly investments to raise a shared brood. However, shared benefits and …

Sexual conflict occurs in biparental species because working together provides shared
benefits while incurring individual costs. In birds, coordination of provisioning visits via turn …

Measuring parental care behaviour in the wild is central to the study of animal ecology and
evolution, but it is often labour‐and time‐intensive. Efficient open‐source tools have recently …

Highlights•Parental care is costly so carers must negotiate relative effort, causing
conflict.•Coordination of care (alternation and synchrony) may resolve this …

To maximise fitness, parents should optimise their investment in each breeding attempt.
When there are multiple carers, the optimal strategy may also depend on the relative timing …

Conservation breeding program practitioners select potential mates in an attempt to
maximize pair compatibility and maintain genetic diversity. Therefore, pair duration, or the …

Several hypotheses propose that parent birds might synchronize their visits to the nest, but
field studies have historically overlooked the temporal pattern of parental care. Either …

For many bird species, trade-offs in resource allocation become stark during incubation,
when caring demands put into direct conflict their investment in reproduction versus survival …

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 …