Collaborative Research: LTREB: The importance of resource availability, acquisition, and mobilization to the evolution of life history trade-offs in a variable environment.

在生物学中，有一个基本的概念，即生物体只能消耗一个单位的能量一次。把更多的精力花在生活的一个方面，就意味着可以花在其他事情上的精力更少。这就导致了这样一种预期：在某一方面表现较好的生物体在另一方面就会表现较差。问题是，大多数时候，当研究人员研究自然界中的生物时，他们发现在一件事上做得更好的个体在其他方面也做得更好。对此的一种解释是，有些人总体上有更多的精力——所以他们可以在生活的两个方面都花更多的精力。这个想法很难在自然界中进行研究，因为很难测量个体有多少能量。在这个项目中，研究人员将对野生红松鼠进行长期研究，以测试食物供应的差异是否会影响个体在生活中不同方面的表现。研究人员可以这样做，因为他们可以跟踪松鼠的一生，因为他们可以测量松鼠储存了多少食物。这很重要，因为这是一种罕见的情况，可以测量出个体有多少食物，并观察他们如何利用这些食物来为生活的不同方面提供能量。这项研究还将帮助我们了解野生动物如何应对环境的变化，这将有助于我们预测它们应对未来环境变化的能力。这项长期的实地研究还将为本科生和研究生提供重要的培训，同时在实地所在地附近的当地社区建立更强的联系和能力。除了向公众开放他们的数据外，研究人员还将开发工具来帮助公众探索收集到的数据，并使用这些数据来回答他们自己的问题。更具体地说，这个项目将检验这样一个假设，即基本的生活史权衡、生活史特征的自然选择措施和生活史特征的遗传基础措施被资源可用性的个体差异所混淆。研究人员可以量化种群中所有个体的储存食物量，以测试这些基本问题。在这一人群中，有记录的食物可获得性的持续变化不仅有可能改变个人可获得的平均食物量，也有可能改变个人之间食物资源的可变性。这意味着未来的环境变化可能会揭示出更强的权衡，并将生活史特征的遗传基础暴露给自然选择。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In biology, there is a basic idea that organisms can only spend a unit of energy once. More energy spent on one aspect of life means that less energy is available to spend on other things. This leads to the expectation that organisms that are better at one thing should be worse at something else. The problem is that most of the time when researchers study organisms in nature they find that individuals that are better at one thing are also better at others. One explanation for this is that some individuals just have access to more energy overall – so they can spend more energy on both aspects of life. This idea has been hard to study in nature because it is very hard to measure how much energy individuals have. In this project, researchers will use a long-term study of wild red squirrels to test whether differences in food availability affect how individuals perform in different aspects of their life. The researchers can do this because they can track squirrels through their lifetime and because they can measure how much food squirrels have stored. This is important because this is one of the rare situations where it is possible to measure how much food individuals have and to see how they use this food to fuel different aspects of their life. This research will also help us to understand how wild animals respond to changes in their environment, which will help us to predict their ability to cope with future changes in the environment. This long-term field study will also provide important training to undergraduate and graduate students while building stronger connections and capacity within local communities near the field location. In addition to making their data open to the public, the researchers will also develop tools to help the public explore the data collected and to use the data to answer their own questions. More specifically, this project will test the hypothesis that fundamental life history trade-offs, measures of natural selection on life-history traits and measures of the genetic basis to life-history traits are confounded by individual variation in resource availability. The researchers can quantify the amount of stored food for all individuals in the population to test these fundamental questions. Documented ongoing changes in the availability of food in this population have the potential to not only change the average amount of food available to individuals but also the amount of variability among individuals in food resources. This means that future environmental changes could reveal stronger trade-offs and expose the genetic basis of life history traits to natural selection.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.