Influence of energy intake on reproduction

了解繁殖对生态学和保护至关重要。尽管进行了深入的研究，但大多数动物物种调节生殖能量获取和分配的过程仍然不清楚。 在这一研究领域取得进展的许多障碍是后勤方面的，反映了能源分配途径重要组成部分的复杂性和时间重叠。 我们提出的研究避免了许多这些后勤困难，重点是动物（蛇），显示清晰的时间划分之间的连续部分的生殖级联（即，卵黄发生、排卵、胚胎发生）;以及采用一种简单但新颖的方法（基于稳定同位素分析）来梳理动物生命史不同阶段中能量获取和能量消耗之间的关系。

Understanding reproduction is fundamentally important to ecology and conservation. Despite intensive research, the processes that regulate energy acquisition and allocation for reproduction are still unclear for most animal species. Many of the obstacles to progress in this field of research are logistical, reflecting the complexity and temporal overlap of significant components of energy allocation pathways. Our proposed study avoids many of these logistical difficulties by focusing on animals (snakes) that display clear temporal partitioning between successive segments of the reproductive cascade (i.e., vitellogenesis, ovulation, embryogenesis); and by adopting a simple but novel method (based on stable isotope analysis) to tease apart the relationship between energy acquisition and energy expenditure in different phases of the animal's life-history.