DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dfn2z3510
title: Data from: Carry on caring: infected females maintain their parental care despite suffering high mortality

description: Parental care is a key component of an organism’s reproductive strategy
 that is thought to trade-off with allocation towards immunity. Yet it is
 unclear how caring parents respond to pathogens: do infected parents
 reduce care as a sickness behaviour or simply from being ill, or do they
 prioritise their offspring by maintaining high levels of care? To address
 this issue, we investigated the consequences of infection by the pathogen
 Serratia marcescens on mortality, time spent providing care, reproductive
 output, and expression of immune genes of female parents in the burying
 beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides. We compared untreated control females
 with infected females that were inoculated with live bacteria,
 immune-challenged females that were inoculated with heat-killed bacteria,
 and injured females that were injected with buffer. We found that infected
 and immune-challenged females changed their immune gene expression and
 that infected females suffered increased mortality. Nevertheless, infected
 and immune-challenged females maintained their normal level of care and
 reproductive output. There was thus no evidence that infection led to
 either a decrease or an increase in parental care or reproductive output.
 Our results show that parental care, which is generally highly flexible,
 can remain remarkably robust and consistent despite the elevated mortality
 caused by infection by pathogens. Overall, these findings suggest that
 infected females maintain a high level of parental care; a strategy that
 may ensure that offspring receive the necessary amount of care but that
 might be detrimental to the parents’ own survival or that may even
 facilitate disease transmission to offspring.
description: The spreadsheets provide data of two separate experiments
 conducted in the burying beetle <em>Nicrophorus
 vespilloides</em>. The first one includes data on the effects of an
 experimental treatments applied to female parents (control = Handled,
 injury = PBS, immune-challenged = Heat.killed, infected = S.marc) on their
 parental behavior, on weight change and on the performance of their
 larvae. It also includes informaiton on the brood and female identity
 (brood_id, female_id). Weights and masses were measured in grams, brood
 sizes in number of individual larvae, female life span in number of days
 between eclosion and death for adult life span (adult_lifespan) and in
 number of days between infection and death for post-infection life span
 (postinfection_lifespan). Female behaviour measured on the day after
 larval hatching (maintenance, feeding) represent a number of scans between
 0 and 30. Total care was then calculated as the sum of maintenance
 and feeding. Note that the analysis was conducted on data excluding the
 broods for which the female was used to sample hemolymph
 (hemolym_extracted) for quantifying immune gene expression presented in
 Data_immune_gene_expression_data.csv. We also excluded data rows
 (to_exclude) from some analyses data rows because eggs failed to hatch,
 females could not be allocated a brood, the female or the whole brood
 died, no behavioural data were collected, the treatment failed,
 or hemolymph samples were too small (see Methods in the article for
 details). Missing data are recorded as NAs. The second
 dataset incudes data on the effects of the same experimental treatments on
 the relative expression of immune genes, abbreviated as: D_CT_Att
 = <b>Δ<sub>CT</sub></b><em>attacin-4</em>, C_CT_CEC = <b>Δ<sub>CT</sub></b><em>cecropin-1</em>, C_CT_Col = <b>Δ<sub>CT</sub></b><em>coleoptericin-1</em>, C_CT_PGRP = <b>Δ<sub>CT</sub></b><em>PGRP-SC2</em>. Missing data are recorded as NAs.