The feast and the famine: spring body mass variations and life history traits in a pulse resource ecosystem

摘要: Phenotypic plasticity is the most immediate mechanism of adaptative response to environmental change. Studying plastic changes in response to fluctuating environments provides insights into how such adjustments may impact life history traits. Here, we used a 14-year data set of repeated body mass measurements in male eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus) to assess the extent of plastic changes for this trait in a resource pulse ecosystem. We first determined the magnitude of variation in body mass at the population level in response to the drastic change in food resource availability from American beech tree seeds (Fagus grandifolia). Males that emerged in the spring from winter torpor following a nonmast year had a lower body mass than males emerging after a mast year, but they tended to recover this loss by mid-June. We found significant among-individual variation in spring body mass plasticity (i.e …