Biology Commons^™

Effects Of Age And Prior Reproduction On The Cost Of Reproduction In Two Species Of Burying Beetles, Ethan Damron, Dane Jo, Mark Belk

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Understanding how much energy an organism allocates to breeding to maximize reproduction over their lifetime, or the cost of reproduction, is a central idea to understanding the variations in patterns of reproduction among living organisms (Creighton et al., 2009). In most studies of cost of reproduction, age is confounded with prior reproductive experience. As individuals age, they tend to reproduce making it difficult to disentangle these two factors when evaluating costs of reproduction. It is not clear whether reproduction early in life costs the same as reproduction later in life and how much of that difference might be due to …