Developmental conditions shape lifetime reproductive strategies in a wild mammal
Petrullo, L.; Delaney, D. M.; Boutin, S.; Lane, J. E.; McAdam, A. G.; Dantzer, B.
Show abstract
Coping with developmental hardship is a defining feature of resilience across the tree of life. Compensatory strategies that preserve fitness after a poor start are hypothesized to be favored by natural selection, but empirical evidence is rare. Using over three decades of data on >1,000 reproductive attempts across the lifetimes of 405 wild female red squirrels, we show that developmental adversity prompts adaptive reorganization of reproductive investment across the lifespan. Hardships reduced lifetime reproductive opportunities, but triggered opposing strategies. Extrinsic mortality risk predicted frontloading of reproduction at debut, while poor maternal investment predicted terminal reproductive effort at a cost to future generations. Both strategies preserved lifetime fitness, revealing how context-dependent reproductive plasticity over the life course can rescue the fitness consequences of developmental hardship.
Matching journals
The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Region-specific CREB function regulates distinct forms of regret associated with resilience versus susceptibility to chronic stress 93%
- Darwin's finches - an adaptive radiation constructed from ancestral genetic modules 93%
- Evolutionary trade-offs between heat and cold tolerance limit responses to fluctuating climates 93%
Similar papers in this journal
- Extensive age-dependent loss of antibody diversity in naturally short-lived turquoise killifish 94%
- Hybridization alters the shape of the genotypic fitness landscape, increasing access to novel fitness peaks during adaptive radiation 93%
- Early-life experience reorganizes neuromodulatory regulation of stage-specific behavioral responses and individuality types during development 93%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.