WARNE, R*; LIGHTFOOT, D; WOLF, BO; University of New Mexico; Museum of Southwestern Biology and University of New Mexico; University of New Mexico: Lizard life history strategies and population dynamics under a regime of pulsed resources

How organisms of varied life history strategies integrate ephemeral pulses of resources to optimize reproductive effort at seasonal and annual time scales is unresolved and critical to our understanding of animal reproduction and subsequent population dynamics. Resource pulses such as rain in arid ecosystems drive seasonal vegetative growth patterns and the dependant population dynamics of herbivorous consumers. The bottom-up effects, however, of these pulsed resources on reproduction and population dynamics of secondary consumers is neither explicitly correlated nor well understood. To examine these dynamics we use a fifteen year dataset of quarterly lizard and arthropod trapping at the Jornada LTER in the arid Chihuahuan desert of southern New Mexico. Our analyses show emergent patterns of lizard populations, secondary consumers in this system, at seasonal and annual timescales as a function of species specific life history strategies.