NEW PAPER: Costs of running differ for egg-laying and live-bearing females
A new paper from Hans Recknagel (during his PhD/postdoc) and Robbie Hussain (while an intern with us) uses the common lizard oviparous - viviparous hybrid zone as an experimental system to measure the cost of running. Published in Ecology and Evolution open access Abstract Pregnancy is a physiological cost of reproduction for animals that rely on fleeing to avoid predators. Costs of reproduction are predicted to differ between alternative reproductive strategies or modes, such as egg-laying (oviparity) or live-bearing (viviparity). However, disentangling the factors that comprise this cost and how it differs for oviparous or viviparous females is challenging due to myriad environmental, biological, and evolutionary confounds. Here, we tested the hypothesis that costs of pregnancy differ between oviparous and viviparous common lizards (Zootoca vivipara). We predicted that the degree of locomotor impairment during pregnancy and therefore the cost of reproduction would be higher in vi