Brood care enhances offspring fitness and survival by providing protection or feeding through parents (commonly by females). It has evolved independently multiple times in animals, e.g. mammals, birds, dinosaurs and arthropods, especially various lineages of insects, and has significant implications for understanding the emergence of sociality of insects. However, few fossil insects document such an ephemeral behaviour directly. New exceptional fossils of the water boatman Karataviella popovi from the Middle-Late Jurassic Daohugou biota (ca 163.5 Ma, northeastern China), with adult females bearing clutches of eggs on their left mesotibia, provide a unique brooding strategy (asymmetric egg-carrying behaviour) unknown in all extinct and extant insects. Our discovery represents the earliest direct evidence of brood care among insects, pushing back by more than 38 million years, indicating that relevant adaptations associated with maternal investment of insects can be traced back to at least the Middle-Late Jurassic, and highlighting the existence of diverse brooding strategies in Mesozoic insects. In addition, our discovery reveals that a specialized trawl-like filter-capture apparatus of K. popovi probably represents pre-adaptions originally used for trapping coeval anostracan (fairy shrimp) eggs for food.
Keywords: Daohugou biota; Jurassic; behaviouristics; water boatman.