Mammalian reproduction: an ecological perspective

Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to organize our concepts about the environmental regulation of reproduction in mammals and to delineate important gaps in our knowledge of this subject. The environmental factors of major importance for mammalian reproduction are food availability, ambient temperature, rainfall, the day/night cycle and a variety of social cues. The synthesis offered here uses as its core the bioenergetic control of reproduction. Thus, for example, annual patterns of breeding are viewed as reflecting primarily the caloric costs of the female's reproductive effort as they relate to the energetic costs and gains associated with her foraging effort. Body size of the female is an important consideration since it is correlated with both potential fat reserves and life span. Variation in nutrient availability may or may not be an important consideration. The evolutionary forces that have shaped the breeding success of males usually are fundamentally different from those acting on females and, by implication, the environmental controls governing reproduction probably also often differ either qualitatively or quantitatively in the two sexes. Mammals often live in habitats where energetic and nutrient challenges vary seasonally, even in the tropics. When seasonal breeding is required, a mammal may use a predictor such as photoperiod or a secondary plant compound to prepare metabolically for reproduction. A reasonable argument can be made, however, that opportunistic breeding, unenforced by a predictor, may be the most prevalent strategy extant among today's mammals. Social cues can have potent modulating actions. They can act either via discrete neural and endocrine pathways to alter specific processes such as ovulation, or they can induce nonspecific emotional states that secondarily affect reproduction. Many major gaps remain in our knowledge about the environmental regulation of mammalian reproduction. For one, we have a paucity of information about the annual patterns of breeding and about the mechanisms controlling these patterns in the most common mammals on the planet-the small to average-sized mammals living in the tropics. We probably have only a shallow conceptualization of the way available energy and nutrients control reproduction and, likewise, we may have only a narrow view of the potential kinds and uses of seasonal predictors. Finally, we have little appreciation of the way environmental cues interact with each other to control reproduction.