The Behavioral Ecology of Maternal Effort in Fur Seals and Sea Lions
نویسنده
چکیده
Mammals are surprisingly flexible in their rearing strategies (BOYCE, 1988). Few investigations have addressed the question which mechanisms produce this flexibility and it is even less clear which of the observed responses are adaptive answers to environmental challenges and which just unavoidable consequences of the animal's physiological and behavioral constraints. While we are still far from complete answers to these difficult questions progress has been made by comparative studies. One drawback of comparative studies is that the genetic differences between species are usually unknown and confound interpretations of adaptive trends. It would therefore be advantageous to study intraspecific changes in rearing strategies in response to changes in environmental parameters. Fur seals and sea lions, the eared (otariid) seals, are an eminently suitable group for the comparative study of maternal strategies: species are behaviorally, physiologically and morphologically similar and yet they live in widely different habitats from subpolar seas to tropical
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