Meeting Abstract
Life history traits exemplify alternative strategies of organisms used to maximize fitness. Environmental disturbances can cause an organism to change these strategies, resulting in trade-offs. Vaejovis cashi, a scorpion species in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, was recently affected by the Horseshoe 2 Fire in 2011. These scorpions acquire their reproductive energy the year prior to giving birth and so individuals collected the year after the fire acquired their energy reserves for reproduction the year of the fire. Gravid females were collected from three regions of the affected area and were curated until they gave birth and their offspring dispersed. The females and offspring were weighed and measured to determine if any life history trade-offs between litter size, offspring mass and size, or female size occurred. By comparing the data from these individuals to data collected the previous year, it was determined that female size was significantly different in all sites, and there was a trend of trade-offs that differed between them. The trend of the least affected site was that litter size and total litter mass was reduced after the fire. In the moderately affected site, there was an increase in litter size and total litter mass, indicating that the offspring were smaller but there were enough of them to exceed the total litter mass of unaffected years. Data here indicate that female scorpions may have changed their life-history strategies in order to maximize their fitness when faced with uncertain environmental conditions.
