Partner cues and individual variation underlie sex-reversed parental care in poison frogs

Flexible parental care strategies are widespread in nature and factor into conflict between the sexes and the realization of sex roles. While adaptive explanations abound, the mechanisms underlying flexible ‘sex-reversal’ of care are less clear. We enlist a biparental frog ( Ranitomeya imitator ) with flexible parental care to investigate the extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms underpinning parental decisions. Using mate removal experiments in the laboratory, we show that members of the primary caregiving sex (males) show less variation than the flexible sex (females) in their propensity to provide care, and that care propensity in females is affected by extrinsic partner cues as well as individual variability. Indeed, individual repeatability in parental effort is high in both typically caregiving and flexible parents. To investigate the underpinnings of differences in care propensity, we sequenced RNA from whole brains of caregiving and non-caregiving frogs of both sexes. While actively caregiving females showed minimal differential gene expression compared to actively caregiving males, females that failed to provide care showed distinct patterns of gene expression. Our findings offer an initial glimpse into the environmental and genetic regulation of individual variation in sex-reversed parental care.