Waiting for the snow to melt…
Maternal characteristics, social dynamics, and environmental factors can all influence reproduction and survival as well as shape trade-offs that might arise between these components of fitness. Short-lived mammals like the golden-mantled ground squirrel (GMGS; Callospermophilus lateralis) tend to maximize effort towards current reproduction at the expense of survival but may be complicated by other aspects of the species’ life history and environment.. Here, we use 25 years of data (1995-2020) collected from a population of GMGS at the Rocky Mountain Biological Research Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, to test the effect of several maternal characteristics (e.g., age, experience, timing of litter emergence), social context (e.g., litter sex ratio, kin density), and environmental context (e.g., date of bare ground, length of vegetative growing season) on survival of reproductive female GMGS using Cox proportional hazard models. Our results indicated that social dynamics (i.e., density) and environmental conditions (i.e., standardized first day of permanent snow cover and length of growing season) explained significant variation in annual maternal survival, while maternal characteristics did not. A higher density of related breeding females and the total number of females (both related and unrelated to the focal mother) were associated with an increase in the mortality hazard. A later standardized date of the first day of permanent snow cover and a shorter growing season both reduced the maternal mortality hazard. Together, our results suggest that factors extrinsic to the squirrels affect maternal survival, and thus may also influence local population growth and dynamics in GMGS and other short-lived, territorial mammal species.
Knowledge graph centered on Maternal survival costs in an asocial mammal: Data with 11 nodes and 50 connections. Top connected: Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Colorado East River Valley, Callospermophilus lateralis, Spermophilus, mark-recapture (Sciuridae).
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