Campus Units
Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
5-2020
Journal or Book Title
Animal Behaviour
Volume
163
First Page
105
Last Page
113
DOI
10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.03.004
Abstract
Parents increase their fitness by investing resources to offspring. However, such investment is costly for parents, leading to tradeoffs, which should shift towards heavier investment to reproduction as females age and future reproductive opportunities decrease. Nests of aquatic turtles laid farther from water have higher survival than those laid closer to shore because nest predators often forage along environmental edges. However, the predation risk of adult females increases farther from water because water is used as refuge from terrestrial predators. Thus, females may balance investment in current offspring vs. maternal survival and future offspring. To test if investment varies depending upon perceived risk, we exposed 30 painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) to simulated predation by capturing and handling them shortly after females chose a nest site. We then released females, which fled to water, and allowed them to return to land and nest undisturbed. We compared the distance to water of nests laid before and after simulated predation. Unexpectedly, females did not vary distance to water in response to simulated predation. Regardless, nest sites chosen after simulated predation were more likely to be depredated than those chosen before simulated predation, suggesting females altered nest-site choice in ways we did not quantify. In addition, although older turtles nested almost twice as far from water as younger turtles, we found no evidence that age influenced maternal response to simulated predation. Our findings suggest perceived risk of mothers to predation influences nest-site choice and subsequently reduces offspring survival in C. picta. In addition, we provide a rare assessment of how plastic maternal investment might vary across reproductive life.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Copyright Owner
The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour
Copyright Date
2020
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Delaney, David M. and Janzen, Fredric J., "Risk-sensitive maternal investment: an evaluation of parent–offspring conflict over nest site choice in the wild" (2020). Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology Publications. 398.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/eeob_ag_pubs/398
Comments
This is a manuscript of an article published as Delaney, David M., and Fredric J. Janzen. "Risk-sensitive maternal investment: an evaluation of parent–offspring conflict over nest site choice in the wild." Animal Behaviour 163 (2020): 105-113. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.03.004.