Meeting Abstract
Trade-offs are thought to constrain the evolution of performance ability, via conflicts in the morphological or physiological bases of different traits. Excellence in a particular task should be associated with poorer performance in a task requiring an opposing design (i.e. functional trade-offs), or poorer performance across all other tasks (i.e. specialist-generalist trade-offs). Though trade-offs may be evident at the physiological level, relatively few studies have successfully identified them at the whole-animal level. Previous studies on humans have shown that accounting for variation in quality (i.e. overall ability across a range of tasks) among individuals can reveal otherwise-concealed performance trade-offs within individuals. In this study, we investigated performance trade-offs in wild northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus), a semi-arboreal marsupial carnivore, across 8 different ecologically-relevant tasks, including endurance, speed, agility, motor control, acceleration, jumping, grasping strength and biting force. We expected to find evidence of functional and specialist-generalist trade-offs, but only after accounting for differences in quality among individuals. Our study is the first non-human study to examine performance trade-offs in this way, and provides insight into the evolutionary basis of performance in a keystone predator.
