Final answer:
Larger animals with Type I reproductive strategies, like mammals and some birds, provide extensive parental care to their relatively few offspring, ensuring their survival into adulthood.
Step-by-step explanation:
Animals that tend to care for their young as they grow and mature are typically larger animals with Type I reproductive strategies, such as many mammals and some birds. These animals produce relatively few offspring and provide them with extensive parental care, which greatly increases the offspring’s chance of survival to adulthood. Examples include humans, kangaroos, pandas, and wolves, where the offspring are quite helpless at birth and require significant time and energy investment from the parents to develop and achieve self-sufficiency. In contrast, animals like many fish, amphibians, and reptiles engage in a Type III reproductive strategy, producing large numbers of offspring with little to no parental care.
Parental care in animals often involves not only the basic needs of feeding and shelter but also protection from predators. Birds such as killdeers have evolved strategies like feigning injury to distract predators and thus protect their offspring. Moreover, animals like meerkats demonstrate another aspect of parental care where adults teach the young necessary survival skills, like how to handle and eat a scorpion without being harmed by its venom