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Great ranging associated with greater reproductive investment in mammals.

ABSTRACT: Most animals must travel to find food, incurring an unavoidable energy and time cost. Economic theory predicts, and experimental work confirms, that within species, increasing the distance traveled each day to find food has negative fitness consequences, decreasing the amount of energy invested in maintenance, repair, and reproduction. Here, we show that this relationship between daily distance traveled and reproductive success is fundamentally different between species and over evolutionary time in many lineages. Phylogenetically controlled analyses of 161 eutherian mammals indicate that, after controlling for body mass, evolutionary increases in the daily distance traveled are associated with corresponding increases in both total fertility (number of offspring per lifetime) and total offspring mass (grams of offspring per lifetime). This suggests that over evolutionary time, increasing travel distance is often part of a strategy for procuring more food energy and not necessarily a response to decreased food availability. These results have important implications for ecological comparisons among species, including assessments of habitat quality based on locomotor behavior.

SUBMITTER: Pontzer H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2629235 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Great ranging associated with greater reproductive investment in mammals.

Pontzer Herman H Kamilar Jason M JM

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20081224 1

Most animals must travel to find food, incurring an unavoidable energy and time cost. Economic theory predicts, and experimental work confirms, that within species, increasing the distance traveled each day to find food has negative fitness consequences, decreasing the amount of energy invested in maintenance, repair, and reproduction. Here, we show that this relationship between daily distance traveled and reproductive success is fundamentally different between species and over evolutionary tim ...[more]

PMID: 19109432

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Project description:Fishes of the family Pomacentridae present a wide diversity of mating systems, ranging from polygyny to promiscuity and from individual territorial defense to the establishment of reproductive colonies of males. The damselfish species Abudefduf troschelii has a reproductive colony mating system, in which males temporarily aggregate in reproductive areas to court and attract females. Males defend an individual territory where they receive eggs and perform paternal care behaviors for their offspring. The present study evaluated the advantages of the colonial mating system in A. troschelii. During an entire reproductive period, in a breeding colony within a rocky reef, we located, marked, geo-referenced, and measured the distances between the territories of all males. We quantified the variance among males in their patterns of paternal care investment, eggs acquired, hatching success, reproductive success, body size, and changes in body coloration. We found that males spatially distributed their nests in groups or independently (i.e., solitary nests). Nesting groups are formed by larger males that show intense nuptial coloration during the entire receptivity period. They are located centrally to the colony and consist of three to six males whose territories overlap. In contrast, small solitary males that fail to acquire or maintain nuptial coloration during the receptivity period establish their nests peripherally to the colony, away from the territories of other males. Our results highlight that the reproductive benefits of colonial nesting are unequal for males, as the spatial distribution of nests within the colony determines the reproductive success of males. Group nesting confers the highest reproductive benefits to males regarding eggs obtained, hatching success, and relative fitness and also enables males to reduce their parental investment in brood care behaviors. The preference of females for oviposition could be associated with greater intrasexual competitiveness, defense ability, body condition, or experience of group-nesting males located at the center of the colony or because their progeny will have a lower probability of predation than they would in solitary nests males.

Dataset Information

Great ranging associated with greater reproductive investment in mammals.

Publications

Great ranging associated with greater reproductive investment in mammals.

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