ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly describes the variation in parental care strategies that find in fishes and then focus on a few growing fields within parental care theory in fish. The diversity of parental care evident in fishes has been used extensively for studying several evolutionary problems. Parental care theory predicts that the level of parental investment should depend on the genetic relationship between parents and offspring. Furthermore, male parental care behaviors can be under direct sexual selection as for instance in species with female choice for the characteristics of nests constructed by males. Life-history theory predicts a strong relationship between the value of the current clutch in relation to future clutches and the level of parental care provided by parents. It would be interesting to see both the comparative approach and the experimental approach extended to other groups of fishes in order to test the generality of the clutch size/parental care and egg size/parental care relationships.
