Sex-specific offspring discrimination reflects respective risks and costs of misdirected care in a poison frog

The ability to differentiate between one's own and foreign offspring ensures the exclusive allocation of costly parental care to only related progeny. The selective pressure to evolve offspring discrimination strategies is largely shaped by the likelihood and costs of offspring confusion. We hypothesize that males and females with different reproductive and spatial behaviours face different risks of confusing their own with others' offspring, and this should favour differential offspring discrimination strategies in the two sexes. In the brilliant-thighed poison frog, Allobates femoralis, males and females are highly polygamous, terrestrial clutches are laid in male territories and females abandon the clutch after oviposition. We investigated whether males and females differentiate between their own offspring and unrelated young, whether they use direct or indirect cues and whether the concurrent presence of their own clutch is essential to elicit parental behaviours. Males transported tadpoles regardless of location or parentage, but to a lesser extent in the absence of their own clutch. Females discriminated between clutches based on exact location and transported tadpoles only in the presence of their own clutch. This sex-specific selectivity of males and females during parental care reflects the differences in their respective costs of offspring confusion, resulting from differences in their spatial and reproductive behaviours.