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19 February 2020 Body mass influences maternal allocation more than parity status for a long-lived cervid mother
Eric S. Michel, Stephen Demarais, Bronson K. Strickland, Jerrold L. Belant, Larry E. Castle
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Abstract

Mothers should balance the risk and reward of allocating resources to offspring to optimize the reproductive value of both offspring and mother while maximizing lifetime reproductive success by producing high-quality litters. The reproductive restraint hypothesis suggests maternal allocation should peak for prime-aged mothers and be less for younger mothers such that body condition is not diminished to a level that would jeopardize their survival or future reproductive events. We assessed if reproductive tactics varied by maternal body mass and parity status in captive female white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to determine if prime-aged mothers allocate relatively more resources to reproduction than primiparous mothers. Maternal body mass, not parity status, positively affected maternal allocation, with heavier mothers producing both heavy litters and heavy individual offspring. Conversely, maternal body mass alone did not affect litter size, rather the interaction between maternal body mass and parity status positively affected litter size such that maternal body mass displayed a greater effect on litter size for primiparous than multiparous mothers. Our results suggest that heavy white-tailed deer mothers allocate additional resources to current year reproduction, which may be an adaptation allowing mothers to produce high-quality litters and increase their annual reproductive success because survival to the next reproductive attempt is not certain.

© 2019 American Society of Mammalogists, www.mammalogy.org
Eric S. Michel, Stephen Demarais, Bronson K. Strickland, Jerrold L. Belant, and Larry E. Castle "Body mass influences maternal allocation more than parity status for a long-lived cervid mother," Journal of Mammalogy 100(5), 1459-1465, (19 February 2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyz107
Received: 25 September 2018; Accepted: 12 June 2019; Published: 19 February 2020
KEYWORDS
birth mass
litter size
maternal allocation
Odocoileus virginianus
parity status
reproductive restraint hypothesis
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