Subordinate male cichlid fish who help with the childcare for the dominant breeding pair are occasionally actually the fathers of some of the offspring they help to rear, according to new research.

Alloparental brood care, where individuals help raising the offspring of others, is generally believed to be favoured by high degrees of relatedness between helpers and recipients. Here we show that ...

Cichlids are one of the largest and strangest groups of vertebrate fish — fish with backbones — on Earth. They’re popular as pets and farmed in aquaculture, and scientists have been studying them ...

Difference in body size (or sexual dimorphism) between males and females is common across the animal kingdom. One of the most extreme examples of sexual dimorphism is found in the cichlid fish species ...

Male cichlids that are constantly threatened by predators grow faster and postpone the full expression of conspicuous breeding coloration for longer. This is shown by a study by biologists from the ...

The evolution of new traits with novel functions has always posed a challenge to evolutionary biology. Studying the color markings of cichlid fish, scientists were now able to show what triggered ...

Subordinate male cichlid fish who help with the childcare for the dominant breeding pair are occasionally actually the fathers of some of the offspring they help to rear, according to new research ...