Life history strategies in ungulates: an experimental approach

A crucial task in ecology is to quantify trade offs between competing processes. Due to environmental correlation, large individual variability in expression of traits and small variability in allocation between competing traits, carefully designed exper iments are needed to quantify these relationships. While experimental, individual based studies have been widely used to quantify life history strategies in birds, virtually no experimental studies have been carried out on ungulates. This is despite that a number of individual based studies have been done. Important life history processes are therefore poorly quantified. Consequently, important aspects of the population dynamics of ungulates are not well understood. Here we propose two carefully designed experiments on ungulates. The first is based on historical knowledge concerning the dynamics in semi-domesticated reindeer populations with strikingly different winter habitats and demography. While generally harsh and variable winter