ArticleFrontiers in zoology2017
Getting fat or getting help? How female mammals cope with energetic constraints on reproduction.
Article in Frontiers in zoology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rebreeding of Female Mountain Lions After Litter Mortality.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- An integrative, peer-reviewed and open-source cooperative-breeding database (Co-BreeD).The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Dwarf Mongooses Lose Body Mass in Hot Weather due to Limited Behavioural Plasticity.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evidence for a reproductive sharing continuum in cooperatively breeding mammals and birds: consequences for comparative research.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Lower Plasmatic Levels of Saturated Fatty Acids and a Characteristic Fatty Acid Composition in the Ovary Could Contribute to the High-Fertility Phenotype in Dummerstorf Superfertile Mice.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- A milk-sharing economy allows placental mammals to overcome their metabolic limits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Substantial but Misunderstood Human Sexual Dimorphism Results Mainly From Sexual Selection on Males and Natural Selection on Females.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Large Lemurs: Ecological, Demographic and Environmental Risk Factors for Weight Gain in Captivity.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Ancestral diet transgenerationally influences offspring in a parent-of-origin and sex-specific manner.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Management factors affecting physical health and welfare of tourist camp elephants in Thailand.PeerJ · 2019Article
- Social influences on survival and reproduction: Insights from a long-term study of wild baboons.The Journal of animal ecology · 2019Article
- Correction to: getting fat or getting help? how female mammals cope with energetic constraints on reproduction.Frontiers in zoology · 2018Article
- Higher resting metabolic rate in long-lived breeding Ansell's mole-rats (Frontiers in zoology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundFat deposits enable a female mammal to bear the energy costs of offspring production and thus greatly influence her reproductive success. However, increasing locomotor costs and reduced agility counterbalance the fitness benefits of storing body fat. In species where costs of reproduction are distributed over other individuals such as fathers or non-breeding group members, reproductive females might therefore benefit from storing less energy in the form of body fat.
resultsUsing a phylogenetic comparative approach on a sample of 87 mammalian species, and controlling for possible confounding variables, we found that reproductive females of species with allomaternal care exhibit reduced annual variation in body mass (estimated as CV body mass), which is a good proxy for the tendency to store body fat. Differential analyses of care behaviours such as allonursing or provisioning corroborated an energetic interpretation of this finding. The presumably most energy-intensive form of allomaternal care, provisioning of the young, had the strongest effect on CV body mass. In contrast, allonursing, which involves no additional influx of energy but distributes maternal help across different mothers, was not correlated with CV body mass.
conclusionsOur results suggest that reproducing females in species with allomaternal care can afford to reduce reliance on fat reserves because of the helpers' energetic contribution towards offspring rearing.
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