1. To secure mating opportunities, males often develop and maintain conspicuous traits that are involved in intra-sexual and/or inter-sexual competition. While current models of sexual selection rely on the assumption that producing such traits is costly, quantifying the cost of allocating to secondary sexual traits remains challenging. 2. According to the principle of allocation, high energy allocation to growth or sexual traits in males should lead to reduced energy allocation to the maintenance of cellular...

1. When they visit and revisit specific areas, animals may reveal what they need from their home range and how they acquire information. The temporal dimension of such movement recursions, i.e., periodicity, is however rarely studied, yet potentially bears a species, population, or individual-specific signature. 2. A recent method allows estimating the contribution of periodic patterns to the variance in a movement path. We applied it to 709 individuals from 5 ungulate species, looking for...

During pregnancy, littermates compete to extract maternal resources from the placenta. Unequal extraction of resources leads to developmental differences among offspring and thus within-litter variation in offspring mass. Because competition among littermates can be stronger among half-sibs, multiple paternity may represent an adaptive strategy allowing females to increase within-litter phenotypic variation among offspring when facing variable environments. Wild boar (Sus scrofa) females produce large litters with diversified offspring in terms of body mass. Additionally, multiple...

Habitat destruction due to human land-use activities is well recognized as a central threat to biodiversity. However, there is still debate about the relative influence of its two components, habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, mostly because few studies have been able to disentangle their respective effects. We studied mechanisms by which habitat destruction might influence the prevalence of vector-transmitted haemosporidian blood parasites of the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus the Lesser Antillean Bullfinch, Loxigilla noctis, on...

Seabirds spend most of their life at sea and have to possess a waterproof plumage to be able to sit on water for extended periods. We tracked juvenile Barau’s petrels for the first time, when they leave their birth colony and found that half of the transmitters stopped soon after they first landed on the water off Réunion Island. We suspected from observation at sea that birds may have problems with the waterproofness of their...

Animal movement is fundamental for ecosystem functioning and species survival, yet the effects of the anthropogenic footprint on animal movements have not been estimated across species. Using a unique GPS-tracking database of 803 individuals across 57 species, we found that movements of mammals in areas with a comparatively high human footprint were on average one-half to one-third the extent of their movements in areas with a low human footprint. We attribute this reduction to behavioral...