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: The plot of "Finding Nemo," a film that features an overprotective single father fish taking on dangers at sea to care for his son, may be more reflective of actual fish dad behavior than was previously known. A new study led by a scientist at Penn State found that baby freshwater fish, when raised by dutiful fathers, fare far better than their non-dad-raised peers in life-or-death situations.
After conducting a novel study that included both behavioral observations and brain genomics analyses, the researchers concluded that early paternal care was associated with later behavioral differences and changes in brain gene regulation. The researchers recently reported their findings in Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society. When the team led by Jason Keagy, associate research professor of wildlife behavioral ecology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, was looking for insight into whether the care a baby receives from its father early in life changes how it behaves later in life, they chose an unusual species to study: threespine stickleback fish.
The small fish—adults typically are less than 3 inches long—are native to most waters in northern latitudes, and they have one important quality. Only stickleback fathers provide care to their offspring. Stickleback mothers do not provide any post-laying parental care; instead, they lay their eggs in the male's nest and immediately leave the territory.
The researchers found that the fish that had received paternal care tended to behave in ways they interpreted as having greater boldness and sociability. And the team reported that paternal care affected brain gene expression. "Having their father around during the first 10 days appeared to influence how the fish behaved later in life," said Keagy, the study's first author.
By far, most of the research on parental-care effects that has been done with model organisms has been conducted with mice and rats—which are very maternally driven, Keagy noted. Behavioral scientists don't understand the effects of fathers as well as those of mothers, he explained, so they turned to sticklebacks. When it comes to parenting, fish brains share surprisingly similar deep hormonal and genetic building blocks with human brains, despite lacking the same complex outer cortical structure, Keagy pointed out.
"Sticklebacks are one of the rare species in which fathers exclusively take care of the babies, so it's a good system to study to try to understand what aspects are changed when a different parent is in charge," he said. "Eventually, we can leverage that knowledge to better understand parental care in general, and ultimately, it may give us insight into the many human problems that come about because of deficient parental care. And conversely, it may help us appreciate the aftereffects of really good parental care." In the study, the researchers used a "half-sib design," meaning they had offspring that shared the same father but had different mothers.
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