Committee Chair

Klug, Hope

Committee Member

Boyd, Jennifer; Qin, Hong

Department

Dept. of Biological and Environmental Sciences

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

The evolution and relationship between life-history traits has been a popular research topic over the past several decades. Previous research has generally focused on a single or small number of species, or a single trait. I utilized multiple trait-based datasets to create a collection of 777 Mammalia species across five taxonomic orders (Artiodactyla, Carnivora, Chiroptera, Primates, Rodentia) to examine the relationships between size, longevity, maturity age, and number of offspring, both within the taxonomic orders and across the Mammalia clade. I found that although the general pattern followed classic “fast-slow continuum”, there were some exceptions to this pattern, specifically body size in Chiroptera and litter size in Artiodactyla and Primates. This suggests that although a correlation between certain life-history traits exist, “slow” traits (large size, long life, few offspring) do evolve in species with “fast” traits when limited by other factors, such as the size requirements for flight.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1552721 (to H Klug). The authors acknowledge the support of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Research reported in this publication was partially supported by the 2017 and 2018 Center of Excellence for Applied Computational Science competitions.

Degree

M. S.; A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Science.

Date

5-2020

Subject

Evolution (Biology); Mammals -- Evolution; Mammals -- Ecology

Keyword

dataset; ecology; evolution; life history; trade offs

Document Type

Masters theses

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

vii, 28 leaves.

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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