No abstract

The goal of this study was to test whether food-anticipatory activity, which is more subtle than feeding activity, can be used as a cue for local enhancement by fish. Golden shiners, Notem&onus crysoleucur, were offered a choice between spending time near a shoal of conspecifics normally fed at that time of day or a shoal normally fed at another time. Despite the fact that no food was delivered during the tests, the shoal that was normally fed at that time had more fish moving and more fish close to the surface, where food usually appeared, than the other shoal. This is evidence of food-anticipatory activity. The choosing shiners, after being deprived of food for 24-48 h, preferred to stay near the anticipating shoal rather than near the other one. When satiated, the shiners chose both shoals at random, indicating that hunger promotes the use of food-anticipatory cues in shoal choice and local enhancement. The results also support the idea that food-anticipatory activity can attract competitors for food and may therefore be costly. Food-anticipatory activity might also attract predators, but the fact that satiated shiners did not actively avoid anticipating shoals indicates that the potential cost of predator attraction would be either low or mitigated by other factors.

Reproductive effort during a female's first breeding attempt could affect subsequent fitness, particularly in species that reproduce before completing body growth. We analyzed 26 years of data on marked bighorn (Ovis canadensis) ewes to assess how variation in first reproductive effort affected other life-history traits. We measured reproductive effort as the residual of the regression of mass of primiparous ewes in late lactation on their mass 1 year earlier. Survival of the first-born lamb to weaning reduced maternal mass gain, suggesting a trade-off between reproduction and growth. Mass gain during the year of primiparity therefore appears to reflect reproductive effort. Lower mass gain was associated with lower adult mass and longevity, two important determinants of lifetime reproductive success. Reproductive effort at first parity therefore appears to lower residual reproductive value. Over their lifetime, females with low mass gain as primiparae produced proportionately more daughters than did females with high mass gain. Reproductive effort at first reproduction was not heritable, and may affect the evolutionary potential of adult mass and longevity, two fitness-related traits that are highly heritable in the study population.