The cost of polygyny and the evolution of female care in poison frogs

Previous research on a variety of organisms indicates that polygyny can impose a cost on the reproductive success of females. Some authors have hypothesized that this cost may have caused the evolution of female parental care from paternal or biparental care in some lineages, particularly in poison frogs of the genus Dendrobates. In this paper, we evaluate the assumptions and theoretical implications of this hypothesis and present several …