Meeting Abstract
In territorial species, contest outcome should affect how individuals allocate energy to current and future reproduction. Anolis sagrei, the brown anole, is a small lizard species that defends territories containing food resources against conspecific intruders during the breeding season. Previous work showed that female winners and losers of staged intrasexual contests allocated energy differently: losers produced eggs that hatched more quickly than the eggs of winners, indicating lower yolk provisioning in losers’ eggs. Contest outcome affected reproductive outcome, but it was unclear whether winners and losers allocated energy uniformly. We compared offspring traits to maternal snout-vent length, a measure of body size that increases linearly with age. We found that although losers’ investment in reproduction was unrelated to body size, winners’ reproductive investment varied with maternal size. Small winners produced eggs that hatched quickly whereas large winners produced eggs that hatched later. We interpret this strategy to be related to potential future reproduction; a large (old) winner should invest in current offspring whereas a small (young) winner should invest in potential future offspring.
