Publikationsdatenbank

Quantifying maternal investment in mammals using allometry (2024)

Art

Zeitschriftenartikel / wissenschaftlicher Beitrag

Autoren

Huijsmans, Tim E.R.G.

Courtiol, Alexandre

Van Soom, Ann

Smits, Katrien

Rousset, François

Wauters, Jella

Hildebrandt, Thomas B. (WE 18)

Quelle

Communications biology

Bandzählung: 7

Heftzählung: 1

Seiten: 475

ISSN: 2399-3642

Sprache

Englisch

Verweise

URL (Volltext): https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06165-x

DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06165-x

Pubmed: 38637653

Kontakt

Nutztierklinik

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14163 Berlin
+49 30 838 62261
klauentierklinik@vetmed.fu-berlin.de

Abstract / Zusammenfassung

Maternal investment influences the survival and reproduction of both mothers and their progeny and plays a crucial role in understanding individuals' life-history and population ecology. To reveal the complex mechanisms associated with reproduction and investment, it is necessary to examine variations in maternal investment across species. Comparisons across species call for a standardised method to quantify maternal investment, which remained to be developed. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing the maternal investment metric - MI - for mammalian species, established through the allometric scaling of the litter mass at weaning age by the adult mass and investment duration (i.e. gestation + lactation duration) of a species. Using a database encompassing hundreds of mammalian species, we show that the metric is not highly sensitive to the regression method used to fit the allometric relationship or to the proxy used for adult body mass. The comparison of the maternal investment metric between mammalian subclasses and orders reveals strong differences across taxa. For example, our metric confirms that Eutheria have a higher maternal investment than Metatheria. We discuss how further research could use the maternal investment metric as a valuable tool to understand variation in reproductive strategies.