• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 259 0

other activity. After the first batch, of course, the maternal care itself—the feeding, the cleaning, the guarding—is foisted off onto the queen's other offspring, but she is still at it, using the sperm she has saved from a dimly recalled frolic in the open air. She can never wait "until the children are grown" to do something for herself; her nest will never be an empty one, and her sacrifice is lifelong. I suppose it's true that not a lot of alternative careers are out there for older female ants and bees, but then many of the human mothers who dream that if only it weren't for the children they would be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company are not exactly being realistic either.

Comedian Milton Berle said, "If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?" The answer is that at least some of the time, they don't—they have six. The social wasps, ants, and bees are highly specialized in their parenting, but many other kinds of insects, from true bugs to ladybird beetles, tend their young to varying degrees. Giant water bug females glue their eggs to the backs of the males, who carry the eggs around until they hatch. Assassin bug parents stand guard over their eggs and hatchlings. Ladybird beetles (a more entomologically correct name than ladybugs, since they lack the soda straw-like mouth parts of true bugs) produce infertile eggs alongside the more conventional ones, apparently solely to feed the voracious young beetle larvae when they hatch. And in some species of cockroaches, insects even more reviled than the earwigs, parents will remain together after mating, and females feed the young with special secretions, almost like milk. Sometimes females do all the parenting, sometimes males do, and sometimes both parents cooperate to raise their young. Finally, in most insects, no one cares for the young at all—the eggs are plopped unceremoniously in their place to fend for themselves after hatching.

All of this variation means that insects are an ideal place to look for insight into the evolution of family life. Why did parental care evolve in some groups and not others? Why does the amount of care, from a brief cleansing swipe over the eggs to putting the kids through college, differ so much among different kinds of animals? Why does mother do most of the work in many species, both parents in a few, and the father alone in fewer still?

Humans and other social mammals are of little help in answering these questions, because we always invest an enormous amount of energy into raising our offspring; we cannot compare situations where care is and is not given. Scientists often use birds to study the evolution of parenting, but these too are rather invariant in their behavior, at least when viewed next to insects. True, some birds, for example, ducks, are ready to waddle at hatching and need only judicious direction to the nearest body of water, while others, for example, robins, spend days or weeks of hard labor ferrying food to the gaping mouths in the nest. But that difference pales in comparison with the contrast between a butterfly who lays her eggs on a plant stem and flits away, and a pair of beetles who collaborate to prepare a ball of carrion for their larvae and then respond to the begging motions of their offspring by feeding them a liquefied meal.

People have dearly held opinions about parenting, of course, which is one reason it is an interesting and worthwhile behavior to understand; for example, we want to know if it is "natural" for fathers to take less of an interest in their daughters than their sons, or in being an attentive parent at all. But beyond questions such as these, understanding how the family evolved can help us understand the evolution of social life itself. At the core of society is the oldest bond between individuals that exists: the bond between a mother and her offspring. Once a female stays with her young, the stage is set for siblings to collude and squabble, for alliances to form and dissolve. That in turn makes more complex social interactions possible. In the wink of an