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Dryad

Data from: Maternal effects and the legacy of extreme environmental events for wild mammals

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Dec 05, 2022 version files 22.73 KB

Abstract

Nutrition underpins population dynamics of large herbivores. The environmental, physiological, and nutritional state of a mother can have a lifetime effect on her offspring. For ungulates, nutrition of the mother during gestation can have an important and often underappreciated effect on the lifetime phenotype, behavior, and success of her offspring. Research in captive settings has shown even with animals that are closely related (i.e., have similar genetic makeups), maternal condition can have serious lifetime implications for an animal’s offspring; mothers in poor condition give birth to sons that exhibit stunted growth compared with sons born to mothers in good condition. Yet, identifying the role of maternal effects in wild animals can be difficult. It requires information on the nutritional legacy of a mother in combination with information on current environmental conditions.

We evaluated how nutrition of a mother potentially affected her male offspring's lifetime trajectory using ingesta-free body fat measurements of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) in the Wyoming Range of western Wyoming, USA. Following a very harsh winter, one female gave birth to a male who remained small for the entirety of his lifetime, which may be attributed to the nutritional stress his mother experienced during that winter. This dataset includes the means and standard errors of IFBFat for female deer captured in March from 2013–2021 and for male deer captured in December from 2018–2021.