Higher maternal care and tolerance in more experienced giraffe mothers
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Higher maternal care and tolerance in more experienced giraffe mothers Markéta Gloneková 1 & Karolína Brandlová 1
&
Jan Pluháček 2,3,4
Received: 14 April 2019 / Revised: 18 September 2019 / Accepted: 10 October 2019 # ISPA, CRL 2019
Abstract Maternal investment and maternal care provided by mammalian females can change during their ontogeny. Differences may be related to the age and/or experience (parity) of the female. Several hypotheses have been postulated to explain changes in the rate of maternal care of females during their lifetime. The residual reproductive value hypothesis supposes a higher rate of maternal care in older and more experienced females, in contrast the targeted reproductive effort hypothesis predicts lower levels of maternal care in older and/or more experienced females. To test these hypotheses we investigated nursing bout frequency and time devoted to nursing as predictors of the rate of maternal care, and rate of successful nursing bouts as a predictor of maternal investment, in captive giraffe (22 females, 47 calves in four zoos). We also considered the high rate of allonursing (nursing of non-filial calves) which appeared in all herds. The nursing and allonursing bout frequency as well as the total time devoted to nursing and allonursing increased with increasing parity and age of the female, thus supporting the residual reproductive value hypothesis. In addition, maternal experience of individual females in terms of parity rather than age was responsible for variation in maternal behaviour. This suggests that variation depends on individual experiences. Keywords Parity . Female Age . Maternal Care . Terminal investment . Reproductive effort . Allonursing
Introduction Maternal investment is an important part of animal reproductive behaviour (Trivers 1972). This investment includes any form of maternal behaviour that increases the fitness of an
offspring at the cost of a mother’s ability to invest in future offspring. In mammals, nursing, i.e. milk provisioning, is the most important component of maternal investment (Krebs et al. 1993) as milk is essential nutrition in the early life of offspring (Oftedal 1985). Maternal investment in nursing can
Significance statement Maternal care in mammals can be expressed by nursing bout frequency and time devoted to nursing and can change with increasing age of the female. The female gains more experience with every calf, i.e. with increasing parity. In our study, we revealed that giraffe females who had produced more calves during their lifetime provide more maternal care in terms of nursing bout duration and frequency. The parity of females seems to be more important than their age, suggesting the role of experience in female nursing behaviour. Interestingly, experienced females provided more care not only to their own offspring but also to offspring of others. We suggest that more experienced females may be more tolerant of non-filial calves due to abundant resources provided in captive conditions. * Karolína Brandlová bran
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