Productive foraging grounds enhance maternal condition and offspring quality in a capital breeding species.

ABSTRACT: Feeding ecology is an essential component of an organism's life, but foraging comes with risks and energetic costs. Species in which populations exhibit more than one feeding strategy, such as sea turtles, are good systems for investigating how feeding ecology impacts life-history traits, reproduction and carried over effects across generations. Here, we investigated how the feeding ecology of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) nesting at the Cabo Verde archipelago correlates with reproductive outputs and offspring quality. We determined the feeding ecology of female turtles before and during the breeding season from stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen and correlated isotopic ratio with female and offspring traits. We found that female turtles feeding at higher trop

SUBMITTER: Fouda L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11387723 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature