Trade-off between current reproductive effort and delay to next reproduction in the leatherback sea turtle

The trade-off between current and future reproduction plays an important role in demographic analyses. This can be revealed by the relationship between the number of years without reproduction and reproductive investment within a reproductive year. However, estimating both the duration between two s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Oecologia 2005-10, Vol.145 (4), p.564-574
Main Authors: Rivalan, Philippe, Prévot-Julliard, Anne-Caroline, Choquet, Remi, Pradel, Roger, Jacquemin, Bertrand, Girondot, Marc
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amphibia. Reptilia
Animal and plant ecology
Animal nesting
Animal reproduction
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
Beaches
Biological and medical sciences
Breeding
Breeding seasons
Capture-recapture models
Dermochelys coriacea
Environmental Sciences
Female
Female animals
French Guiana
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Marine
Marine ecology
Multistate-model
Musical intervals
Population Ecology
Reproduction
Reproductive skipping
Reproductive trade-off
Sea turtles
Sexual Behavior, Animal
Turtles
Vertebrates: general zoology, morphology, phylogeny, systematics, cytogenetics, geographical distribution
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Summary:The trade-off between current and future reproduction plays an important role in demographic analyses. This can be revealed by the relationship between the number of years without reproduction and reproductive investment within a reproductive year. However, estimating both the duration between two successive breeding season and reproductive effort is often limited by variable recapture or resighting effort. Moreover, a supplementary difficulty is raised when nonbreeder individuals are not present sampling breeding grounds, and are therefore unobservable. We used capture-recapture (CR) models to investigate intermittent breeding and reproductive effort to test a putative physiological trade-off in a long-lived species with intermittent breeding, the leatherback sea turtle. We used CR data collected on breeding females on Awa:la-Ya:lima:po beach (French Guiana, South America) from 1995 to 2002. By adding specific constraints in multistate (MS) CR models incorporating several nonobservable states, we modelled the breeding cycle in leatherbacks and then estimated the reproductive effort according to the number of years elapsed since the last nesting season. Using this MS CR framework, the mean survival rate was estimated to 0.91 and the average resighting probability to 0.58 (ranged from 0.30 to 0.99). The breeding cycle was found to be limited to 3 years. These results therefore suggested that animals whose observed breeding intervals are greater than 3 years were most likely animals that escaped detection during their previous nesting season(s). CR data collected in 2001 and 2002 allowed us to compare the individual reproductive effort between females that skipped one breeding season and females that skipped two breeding seasons. These inferences led us to conclude that a trade-off between current and future reproduction exists in leatherbacks nesting in French Guiana, likely linked to the resource provisioning required to invest in reproduction.
ISSN:0029-8549
1432-1939
DOI:10.1007/s00442-005-0159-4