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Foraging decisions in a capital breeder: trade-offs between mass gain and lactation

  • Behavioral Ecology - Original Paper
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Abstract

The high energetic costs of lactation can lead to fundamental trade-offs in life-history traits, particularly in young females that reproduce before completing body growth. We assessed whether lactating female mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) used behavioural tactics at fine spatio-temporal scales to increase energy intake to compensate for the costs of lactation. Lactating females increased bite rate and chewing rate compared with non-lactating females, but selected similar foraging sites in terms of plant quality and abundance. At peak lactation, forage intake of lactating females was >40% greater than that of non-lactating females. For females that had reached asymptotic body mass (i.e. ≥6 years old), summer mass gain of lactating females was similar to that of non-lactating females. At 4 and 5 years of age, however, daily mass gain of lactating females was about 20% lower than that of non-lactating females. We conclude that increased foraging may allow fully-grown lactating females to compensate for the energetic costs of lactation, but that there is a major trade-off between mass gain and lactation for younger females.

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Acknowledgments

Our research was financed by the Alberta Conservation Association, the Alberta Fish and Wildlife Division, the Alberta Sport, Recreation, Parks and Wildlife Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Université Laval. S.H. received scholarships from NSERC and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies. We especially thank M. Festa-Bianchet and K.G. Smith for fruitful discussions and logistical help. We are grateful to M. Bégin Pépin, C. Cameron, E. Cardinal, G. Côté, E. Drouin, M. Favre, C.A. Gagnon, Y. Gendreau, M. Houle, L. MacPherson, S. Popp, S. Rioux and V. Viera for help with field work, and to A. Brousseau, M. Gravel, L. L’Italien, and G. Picard for help with laboratory work. We thank the Centre de Conservation de la Biodiversité Boréale for allowing us to work with captive mountain goats, and C. Gagnon and R. Hamel for logistical help in this experiment. Valuable comments from P. Blanchard, J.-M. Gaillard, V. Harvey, I. Kojola, J. Taillon and two anonymous reviewers improved earlier versions of this manuscript. This research project was approved by the Canadian Council for Animal Care committee of the Université Laval.

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  1. Sandra Hamel

    Present address: Department of Biology, University of Tromsø, 9037, Tromsø, Norway

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  1. Département de Biologie and Centre d’études nordiques, Université Laval, 1045 avenue de la Médecine, Quebec, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Sandra Hamel & Steeve D. Côté

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Correspondence to Sandra Hamel.

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Communicated by Jean-Michel Gaillard.

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Hamel, S., Côté, S.D. Foraging decisions in a capital breeder: trade-offs between mass gain and lactation. Oecologia 161, 421–432 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-009-1377-y

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