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Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs
BACKGROUND: The amount of resources provided by the mother before birth has important and long-lasting effects on offspring fitness. Despite this, there is a large amount of variation in maternal investment seen in natural populations. Life-history theory predicts that this variation is maintained t...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995767/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27559356 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-016-0172-y |
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author | Pick, Joel L. Hutter, Pascale Ebneter, Christina Ziegler, Ann-Kathrin Giordano, Marta Tschirren, Barbara |
author_facet | Pick, Joel L. Hutter, Pascale Ebneter, Christina Ziegler, Ann-Kathrin Giordano, Marta Tschirren, Barbara |
author_sort | Pick, Joel L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: The amount of resources provided by the mother before birth has important and long-lasting effects on offspring fitness. Despite this, there is a large amount of variation in maternal investment seen in natural populations. Life-history theory predicts that this variation is maintained through a trade-off between the benefits of high maternal investment for the offspring and the costs of high investment for the mother. However, the proximate mechanisms underlying these costs of reproduction are not well understood. Here we used artificial selection for high and low maternal egg investment in a precocial bird, the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) to quantify costs of maternal reproductive investment. RESULTS: We show that females from the high maternal investment lines had significantly larger reproductive organs, which explained their overall larger body mass, and resulted in a higher resting metabolic rate (RMR). Contrary to our expectations, this increase in metabolic activity did not lead to a higher level of oxidative damage. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to provide experimental evidence for metabolic costs of increased per offspring investment. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4995767 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-49957672016-08-25 Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs Pick, Joel L. Hutter, Pascale Ebneter, Christina Ziegler, Ann-Kathrin Giordano, Marta Tschirren, Barbara Front Zool Research BACKGROUND: The amount of resources provided by the mother before birth has important and long-lasting effects on offspring fitness. Despite this, there is a large amount of variation in maternal investment seen in natural populations. Life-history theory predicts that this variation is maintained through a trade-off between the benefits of high maternal investment for the offspring and the costs of high investment for the mother. However, the proximate mechanisms underlying these costs of reproduction are not well understood. Here we used artificial selection for high and low maternal egg investment in a precocial bird, the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) to quantify costs of maternal reproductive investment. RESULTS: We show that females from the high maternal investment lines had significantly larger reproductive organs, which explained their overall larger body mass, and resulted in a higher resting metabolic rate (RMR). Contrary to our expectations, this increase in metabolic activity did not lead to a higher level of oxidative damage. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to provide experimental evidence for metabolic costs of increased per offspring investment. BioMed Central 2016-08-23 /pmc/articles/PMC4995767/ /pubmed/27559356 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-016-0172-y Text en © The Author(s). 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Pick, Joel L. Hutter, Pascale Ebneter, Christina Ziegler, Ann-Kathrin Giordano, Marta Tschirren, Barbara Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title | Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title_full | Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title_fullStr | Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title_full_unstemmed | Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title_short | Artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
title_sort | artificial selection reveals the energetic expense of producing larger eggs |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995767/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27559356 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12983-016-0172-y |
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