Dear MARMAM colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that the following paper is now available online:
Enrico Pirotta, Vincent Hin, Marc Mangel, Leslie New, Daniel P. Costa, André M.
de Roos, and John Harwood. 2020. Propensity for risk in reproductive strategy
affects susceptibility to anthropogenic disturbance. The American Naturalist
196(4).
Abstract:
Animals initiate, interrupt or invest resources in reproduction in light of
their physiology and the environment. The energetic risks entailed in an
individual’s reproductive strategy can influence the ability to cope with
additional stressors, such as anthropogenic climate change and disturbance. To
explore the trade-offs between internal state, external resource availability
and reproduction, we applied State-Dependent Life-History Theory (SDLHT) to a
Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) model for long-finned pilot whales ( Globicephala
melas). We investigated the reproductive strategies emerging from the interplay
between fitness maximization and propensity to take energetic risks, and the
resulting susceptibility of individual vital rates to disturbance. Without
disturbance, facultative reproductive behavior from SDLHT and fixed rules in
the DEB model led to comparable individual fitness. However, under disturbance,
the reproductive strategies emerging from SDLHT increased vulnerability to
energetic risks, resulting in lower fitness than fixed rules. These fragile
strategies might therefore be unlikely to evolve in the first place.
Heterogeneous resource availability favored more cautious, and thus more
robust, strategies, particularly when knowledge of resource variation was
accurate. Our results demonstrate that the assumptions regarding the dynamic
trade-offs underlying an individual’s decision-making can have important
consequences for predicting the effects of anthropogenic stressors on wildlife
populations.
A PDF copy of the paper can be downloaded from:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/710150
Please do not hesitate to contact me for any question regarding our work.
Best Regards,
Enrico Pirotta
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