This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change is one of the most complex challenges of our time and places considerable strain on a wide range of animal groups. A research team at the University of Bayreuth has used burying beetles to investigate the extent to which social interactions among family members can buffer the effects of environmental stress.
Their findings have been published in the journal Functional Ecology. Climate change is causing global temperatures to rise and extreme weather events such as heat waves, cold snaps, floods and droughts to become more frequent. These changes place substantial pressure on biological systems and can alter behavior as well as impair fertility, reproductive success and offspring survival.
It is already known that parental care in animals can help buffer offspring against stressors such as extreme temperatures. In the new Bayreuth study, the researchers investigated whether interactions among siblings can likewise help young animals cope with climate-related challenges. Such insights could improve predictions of which species are particularly vulnerable to climate change and which strategies may help them survive.
For a long time, parental care was regarded as a key evolutionary factor driving the formation of family groups in the animal kingdom. However, a growing body of research now highlights the positive effects of sibling interactions on offspring development. "This has increasingly directed scientific attention toward cooperation among siblings as an early factor in the evolution of social and family life," says Paul Huber, a doctoral researcher at the Evolutionary Animal Ecology research group at the University of Bayreuth and first author of the study.
Of particular interest today is how interactions between different family members may reduce the effects of so-called abiotic stressors such as temperature or water availability. "We wanted to find out whether sibling interactions mitigate abiotic stress in a similar way to parental care, whether they may act synergistically with parental care, or whether they lose their positive effect under certain conditions," Huber explains. The researchers studied burying beetles of the species Nicrophorus vespilloides.
"This beetle is an excellent model organism for investigating social interactions because parental care can occur, although the larvae do not strictly require care for survival. At the same time, cooperation also occurs among the offspring," says Sandra Steiger, chair of Evolutionary Animal Ecology at the University of Bayreuth. In the first experiment, the researchers varied temperature conditions to simulate cold stress and heat waves.
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