Abstract
Animals make feeding decisions to simultaneously maximize fitness traits that often require different nutrients. Recent quantitative methods have been developed to characterize these nutritional trade-offs from performance landscapes on which traits are mapped on a nutrient space defined by two nutrients. This limitation constrains the broad applications of previous methods to more complex data, and a generalized framework is needed. Here, we build on previous methods and introduce a generalized vector-based approach—the vector of position approach—to study nutritional trade-offs in complex multidimensional spaces. The vector of position approach allows the estimate of performance variations across entire landscapes (peaks and valleys) and comparison of these variations between animals. Using landmark published data sets on life span and reproduction landscapes, we illustrate how our approach gives accurate quantifications of nutritional trade-offs in two- and three-dimensional spaces and can bring new insights into the underlying nutritional differences in trait expression between species. The vector of position approach provides a generalized framework for investigating nutritional differences in life-history trait expression within and between species, an essential step for the development of comparative research on the evolution of animal nutritional strategies.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | E168–E181 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | The American Naturalist |
Volume | 193 |
Issue number | 6 |
Early online date | 4 Apr 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
We are grateful to Fleur Ponton, Russell Bonduriansky, and Emilie Snell-Rood as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript.We are grateful to Ben Fanson, Kwang Lee, and Phil Taylor for sharing their data. This research was funded by a grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche to M.L. (ANR-16-CE02-0002-01).Keywords
- nutritional geometry
- nutritional trade-off
- performance landscapes
- fitness
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Juliano Morimoto Borges
- School of Natural & Computing Sciences, Mathematical Science - Senior Lecturer
Person: Academic