Parent–offspring conflict (POC) is an expression coined in 1974 by Robert Trivers. It is used to describe the evolutionary conflict arising from differences in optimal parental investment (PI) in an offspring from the standpoint of the parent and the offspring. PI is any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that decreases the parent's ability to invest in other offspring, while the selected offspring's chance of surviving increases.
POC occurs in sexually reproducing species and is based on a genetic conflict: Parents are equally related to each of their offspring and are therefore expected to equalize their investment among them. Offspring are only half or less related to their siblings (and fully related to themselves), so they try to get more PI than the parents intended to provide even at their siblings' disadvantage. However, POC is limited by the close genetic relationship between parent and offspring: If an offspring obtains additional PI at the expense of its siblings, it decreases the number of its surviving siblings. Therefore, any gene in an offspring that leads to additional PI decreases (to some extent) the number of surviving copies of itself that may be located in siblings. Thus, if the costs in siblings are too high, such a gene might be selected against despite the benefit to the offspring. The problem of specifying how an individual is expected to weigh a relative against itself has been examined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964 in the context of kin selection. Hamilton's rule says that altruistic behavior will be positively selected if the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the performer is greater than the cost to the performer of a social act. Conversely, selfish behavior can only be favoured when Hamilton's inequality is not satisfied. This leads to the prediction that, other things being equal, POC will be stronger under half siblings (e.g., unrelated males father a female's successive offspring) than under full siblings.
Occurrence
In plants
In plants, POC over the allocation of resources to the brood members may affect both brood size (number of seeds matured within a single fruit) and seed size. Concerning brood size, the most economic use of maternal resources is achieved by packing as many seeds as possible in one fruit, i.e., minimizing the cost of packing per seed. In contrast, offspring benefits from low numbers of seeds per fruit, which reduces sibling competition before and after dispersal. Conflict over seed size arises because there usually exists an inverse exponential relationship between seed size and fitness, that is, the fitness of a seed increases at a diminishing rate with resource investment but the fitness of the maternal parent has an optimum, as demonstrated by Smith and Fretwell (see also marginal value theorem). However, the optimum resource investment from the offspring's point of view would be the amount that optimizes its inclusive fitness (direct and indirect fitness), which is higher than the maternal parent's optimum.
This conflict about resource allocation is most obviously manifested in the reduction of brood size (i.e. a decrease in the proportion of ovules matured into seeds). Such reduction can be assumed to be caused by the offspring: If the maternal parent's interest were to produce as few seeds as observed, selection would not favour the production of extra ovules that do not mature into seeds. (Although other explanations for this phenomenon exist, such as genetic load, resource depletion or maternal regulation of offspring quality, they could not be supported by experiments.)
There are several possibilities how the offspring can affect paternal resource allocation to brood members. Evidence exists for siblicide by dominant embryos: Embryos formed early kill the remaining embryos through an aborting chemical. In oaks, early fertilized ovules prevent the fertilization of other ovules by inhibiting the pollen tube entry into the embryo sac. In some species, the maternal parent has evolved postfertilization abortion of few seeded pods. Nevertheless, cheating by the offspring is also possible here, namely by late siblicide, when the postfertilization abortion has ceased.