Pregnancy reduces concurrent pup care behaviour in meerkats, generating differences between dominant and subordinate females

Shay Rotics, Frank Groenewoud, Marta Manser, Tim Clutton-Brock

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In some mammals, and particularly in cooperative breeding ones, successive bouts of reproduction can overlap so that a female is often pregnant while still nurturing dependent young from her previous litter. Such an overlap requires females to divide their energetic budget between two reproductive activities, and pregnancy costs would consequently be expected to reduce investment in concurrent offspring care. However, explicit evidence for such reductions is scarce, and the potential effects they may have on work division in cooperative breeders have not been explored. Using 25 years of data on reproduction and cooperative behaviour in wild Kalahari meerkats, supplemented with field experiments, we investigated whether pregnancy reduces contributions to cooperative pup care behaviours, including babysitting, provisioning and raised guarding. We also explored whether pregnancy, which is more frequent in dominants than subordinates, could account for the reduced contributions of dominants to the cooperative pup care behaviours. We found that pregnancy, particularly at late stages of gestation, reduces contributions to cooperative pup care; that these reductions are eliminated when the food available to pregnant females is experimentally supplemented; and that pregnancy effects accounted for differences between dominants and subordinates in two of the three cooperative behaviours examined (pup provisioning and raised guarding but not babysitting). By linking pregnancy costs with reductions in concurrent pup care, our findings illuminate a trade-off between investment in successive, overlapping bouts of reproduction. They also suggest that some of the differences in cooperative behaviour between dominant and subordinate females in cooperative breeding mammals can be a direct consequence of differences in their breeding frequency.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1431-1441
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Animal Ecology
Volume92
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2023

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
  • Animal Science and Zoology

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