Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-26-2022
Abstract
Reproductive traits are central to organismal fitness, and so the factors influencing patterns of reproduction and offspring survival are at the heart of biology. Making use of breeding data collected over 16 years at the King Khalid Wildlife Research Centre in Saudi Arabia, we investigated the reproductive biology of Arabian gazelles Gazella arabica. Offspring survival was mainly a function of birth weight, with heavier offspring having higher survival rates than lighter offspring. However, while sons were heavier than daughters, daughters had higher survival rates. We could not find evidence that giving birth to sons negatively impacts offspring weight in the following year. We uncovered large narrow-sense heritability (h2) in offspring weight at birth, while maternal effects (m2) on birth weight were of lesser importance. However, maternal effects on offspring survival were strong until weaning age, while paternal effects dominated survival to sexual maturity and first reproduction. We propose that variation in maternal postnatal care might overshadow the effects of maternal inheritance of birth weights, while the overall strong heritability of weight at birth and the paternal effects on survival illustrates strong variance in sire fitness based on genetic quality, suggesting a role for sexual selection by female mate choice in wild populations.
Keywords
Arabian gazelles, heritability, life-history evolution, offspring mortality, sex differences, ungulates
Language
English
Publication Title
Current Zoology
Rights
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Editorial Office, Current Zoology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Ryan A Martin, Rüdiger Riesch, Martin Plath, Naif A Al Hanoosh, Torsten Wronski, Reproductive biology of Gazella arabica: Predictors of offspring weight and short- and long-term offspring survival, Current Zoology, Volume 69, Issue 6, December 2023, Pages 643–653, https://doi.org/10.1093/cz/zoac084