Reducing losses to offspring mortality by redistributing resources

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Abstract
1. It is shown that reallocation of resources from dying offspring to their surviving siblings leads to significant reductions of fitness losses due to early developmental errors. 2. The reason resource reallocation can improve offspring fitness is because mothers do not provide offspring with the optimal amount of resources from the offspring’s point of view. Rather, mothers trade their investment per offspring off against the number of offspring. Hence, surviving offspring can use reallocated resources fruitfully. 3. Animals suffering high offspring mortality can reduce this cost by producing large packages of resources shared by offspring. This allows for better reallocation of resources. Furthermore, by overstocking their resource packages with eggs they can anticipate embryo mortality and obtain offspring that will on average be more optimal in size. 4. In accordance with our prediction, parthenogenetic flatworms studied here produce larger cocoons than sexuals and they overstock smaller cocoons with eggs. However, higher embryo survival in large cocoons may also explain both these phenomena.