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Paternity cues and mating opportunities: what makes fathers good?

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Abstract

Human males provide facultative paternal investment to their offspring; that is, the male care is not necessary for the survival of his offspring. It is expected that the degree of male investment (1) increases with growing paternity certainty, (2) increases when investment increases the survival and later reproductive prospect of offspring and (3) declines when there are opportunities to mate with multiple females. Using a large sample of adult offspring and their fathers (n = 245), we first investigated the role of two factors possibly involved in the assessment of paternity and subsequently regulating the level of paternal investment: (a) father–child facial resemblance and (b) assortative mating for eye colour. Second, because mating opportunities are inversely related to paternal investment, we also investigated how male facial attractiveness (a cue of mate opportunities) correlates with paternal investment. In line with paternal investment theory, male investment positively correlated with offspring facial resemblance. However, paternal investment were neither higher among blue-eyed couples, nor there were preferences of blue-eyed men to marry with blue-eyed women. Moreover, father facial attractiveness was unrelated to paternal investment. These results indicate that resemblance between offspring and their fathers still plays an important role in paternal investment decision later in offspring’s life.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank two anonymous referees for valuable improvements and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The project was partially supported by KEGA 3/7454/09, VEGA1/0155/08 and VEGA 2/0009/09.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 84506, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Pavol Prokop

  2. Department of Biology, University of Trnava, Priemyselná 4, P.O. Box 9, 91843, Trnava, Slovakia

    Pavol Prokop & Zuzana Obertová

  3. Department of Ecosozology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Comenius University, Bratislava, 84215, Slovakia

    Peter Fedor

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  1. Pavol Prokop
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  2. Zuzana Obertová
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  3. Peter Fedor
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Correspondence to Pavol Prokop.

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Prokop, P., Obertová, Z. & Fedor, P. Paternity cues and mating opportunities: what makes fathers good?. acta ethol 13, 101–107 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-010-0079-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-010-0079-0

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