Parturition dates in wild Eurasian lynx: evidence of a second oestrus?
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Parturition dates in wild Eurasian lynx: evidence of a second oestrus? Jenny Mattisson1 · John Odden2 · John D. C. Linnell1 · Johanna Painer3 · Jens Persson4 · Henrik Andrén4 Received: 31 January 2020 / Accepted: 8 May 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Understanding reproductive physiology of a species is important to assess their potential to respond to environmental variation and perturbation of their social system during the mating or pre-mating seasons. We report 175 parturition dates from wild Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in Scandinavia. Most lynx birth dates were highly synchronised around a mean of 30th May (SD = 9 days) with 173 of the 175 births ranging from May 2nd to June 30th. We detected two very late births on July 29th and August 15th in the absence of any indication that the females had given birth and lost a litter earlier in the year. We propose that these represent evidence of a second oestrus which is highly unusual in lynx because of their unique reproductive physiology. The rarity of these late season births has implications for lynx demography and social organisation. Keywords Lynx lynx · Reproduction · Parturition date · Conservation Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), the largest species in the Lynx genus, is a solitary felid inhabiting the boreal forest of Eurasia (Chapron et al. 2014). Eurasian lynx become sexually mature at two years of age (Axner et al. 2009) but not all 2-year olds manage to breed successfully (Nilsen et al. 2012b). In Scandinavia, lynx mate in March–April and after a gestation length of 66–70 days (Painer et al. 2014) they give birth to 1–4 kittens, 2 being the most common litter size (Gaillard et al. 2014). The kittens stay with their mother until they are between 8 and 11 months old (Samelius et al. 2012). In contrast to most felid species (e.g. Jansen and Jenks 2012; Balme et al. 2013), lynx are strict seasonal breeders (Henriksen et al. 2005), reproducing only once a year and normally with only a single ovulatory cycle (Painer et al. 2014). Female lynx display a unique physiology of persistent Handling editor: Yoshiyuki Henning. * Jenny Mattisson [email protected] 1
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), 7485 Trondheim, Norway
2
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), 0349 Oslo, Norway
3
Department of Interdisciplinary Life Sciences, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, 1160 Vienna, Austria
4
Grimsö Wildlife Research Station, Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 730 91 Riddarhyttan, Sweden
corpora lutea, which produce elevated serum progesterone levels during the non-mating season which normally hinders an oestrus onset later in the season (Painer et al. 2014). This results in a highly synchronised birth season, with only single anecdotal published incidences of late births in captive (Henriksen et al. 2005) and wild (Breitenmoser-Würsten et al. 2007) lynx. Reproduction is costly for female lynx (Nilsen et al. 2010) and breeding success increases with the availabili
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