The Consequences of Maternal effects and Environmental Conditions on Offspring Success in an Antarctic Predator

在极地海洋哺乳动物中，母体对后代生存、繁殖和对后代贡献的能力的影响变化的后果很少得到评估。这是由于在不同的环境条件下，对具有已知和不同特征的母亲所生的众多后代的生存和生殖结果有足够的数据是一项挑战。本研究项目将评估罗斯海一个单独标记的威德尔海豹种群的早期环境条件和与母体属性（如出生日期、出生质量、断奶质量和游泳行为）相关的后代特征变化对生存和繁殖的影响。研究结果将有助于评估不同类型的个体对威德尔海豹种群维持的重要性，并更好地评估影响过去和未来种群动态的因素。该项目允许记录特定个体海豹的独特历史，并将这些信息提供给更广泛的科学社区，以寻求研究这些海豹，教育生态学研究生和本科生，制作科学宣传视频，并开发有关该项目的科学活动，目标和成果的多媒体iBook。该研究的广泛目标是评估幼犬特征变异的不同来源对生存和繁殖的重要性。该研究将(1)在不同的环境条件下记录多组幼崽（由已知年龄的母崽所生）的出生日期、体重指标和在水中度过的时间；(2)标记所有在大埃里伯斯湾研究区域出生的幼崽，并进行反复调查，监测这些幼崽在第一次繁殖时的命运；(3)使用专门为每年单独标记和重新观察的动物数据设计的分析来评估关于出生日期、幼崽质量、幼崽在水中度过的时间以及环境条件与这些幼崽早期生存和招募变化之间的关系的假设。这项研究还将记录人口状况，这将有助于建立可追溯到1978年的当地人口独特的长期数据库。

The consequences of variation in maternal effects on the ability of offspring to survive, reproduce, and contribute to future generations has rarely been evaluated in polar marine mammals. This is due to the challenges of having adequate data on the survival and reproductive outcomes for numerous offspring born in diverse environmental conditions to mothers with known and diverse sets of traits. This research project will evaluate the survival and reproductive consequences of early-life environmental conditions and variation in offspring traits that are related to maternal attributes (e.g. birth date, birth mass, weaning mass, and swimming behavior) in a population of individually marked Weddell seals in the Ross Sea. Results will allow an evaluation of the importance of different types of individuals to the Weddell Seal's population sustenance and better assessments of factors contributing to the population dynamics in the past and into the future. The project allows for documentation of specific individual seal's unique histories and provisioning of such information to the broader science community that seeks to study these seals, educating graduate and undergraduate ecology students, producing science-outreach videos, and developing a multi-media iBook regarding the project's science activities, goals and outcomes. The research has the broad objective of evaluating the importance of diverse sources of variation in pup characteristics to survival and reproduction. The study will (1) record birth dates, body mass metrics, and time spent in the water for multiple cohorts of pups (born to known-age mothers) in years with different environmental conditions; (2) mark all pups born in the greater Erebus Bay study area and conduct repeated surveys to monitor fates of these pups through the age of first reproduction; and (3) use analyses specifically designed for data on animals that are individually marked and resighted each year to evaluate hypotheses about how variation in birth dates, pup mass, time spent in the water by pups, and environmental conditions relate to variation in early-life survival and recruitment for those pups. The research will also allow the documentation of the population status that will contribute to the unique long-term database for the local population that dates back to 1978.