Parental investment

Parental investment is time, energy, and resources devoted to offspring that reduce a parent's ability to invest in other offspring or pursue further reproduction.

Bateman's principle: A proposed relationship between reproductive success and mating success, often stronger in males than females. It connects unequal reproductive costs to sex differences in potential mating success.
Parental care: Behavior by a parent that increases offspring survival or development after fertilization or birth. Care is one form of investment, but investment also includes costly provisioning and other resources.
Biparental care: Care of offspring by both parents. It shows that substantial investment can be shared rather than borne by one sex.
Parasitic behavior: An interaction in which one organism benefits while imposing costs on another. Unlike parental investment, parasitic exploitation benefits the actor without providing a net benefit to offspring.
Sexual selection: Evolutionary change in traits that affect success in competition for mates or in attracting them. Parental investment helps explain why sexual selection differs between the sexes.
Reproductive success: An individual's contribution of surviving offspring to later generations. Investment costs matter evolutionarily through their effects on total reproductive success.
Paternal care: Care of offspring provided by a male parent. Male care is especially informative where it changes mating competition or limits further reproduction.
Infanticide: The killing of an infant by an individual of the same species. It can eliminate another individual's investment and alter the survivor's future reproductive opportunities.
Operational sex ratio: The ratio of sexually available males to sexually available females in a population. Unequal care can change which sex is available to mate and therefore who competes.
Fitness (biology): An organism's contribution to future generations, measured through survival and reproduction. Investment is favored when its effects increase an individual's evolutionary fitness.

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