Meeting Abstract
Maternal fitness of animals is tightly correlated with allocation of maternal resources to gametes and resulting offspring. Understanding how animals physiologically achieve this allocation process and what are its limitations may provide insights into the evolution of life-histories. In order to reproduce, animals must obtain anabolic nutrients (lipid and protein) from their environment. The quality of prey consumed dictates the raw materials a mother will have available to allocate to production of her offspring. However, prey quality in terms of lipid and protein likely varies environmentally. Allocation of maternal resources is therefore likely to vary as prey quality varies. To add an additional layer of complexity, maternal protein and lipid are allocated at dissimilar proportions due to differences in how they are utilized by developing offspring. Thus, it is unclear how variation in prey quality will vary maternal allocation to offspring. To address this question, we supplemented the diets of captive brown house snakes (Boaedon fuliginosus) with either protein, lipid, or both and measured eggs and offspring produced from these mothers. We measured egg size, clutch size, clutch mass, hatchling mass, and hatchling length of all clutches and compared these values to clutches produced from females on control diets. While we are currently still measuring clutches, we estimated treatment effects by comparing residuals from regressions of female size and each clutch/hatchling characteristic. Here we will present our preliminary data from this experiment.
