ArticleCommunications biology2024
Quantifying maternal investment in mammals using allometry.
Article in Communications biology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 1 citations in OpenAlex.
- Placental crises: disruptive selection and maternal under-investment as the foundations of mammalian placental evolution and dysfunction.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Monitoring Weaning Stress in Fillies and Colts on a Thoroughbred Breeding Farm by Cortisol and Blood Inflammatory Markers: The Benefits of Gradual Separation and Social Support.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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