The role of fecundity dynamics and time of injury for female reproductive fitness

Animals have a wide range of reproductive strategies and change how they produce offspring as a function of their age, environment, risk of predation or starvation, and as a result of trade-offs with other life history traits. In turn, these temporal patterns of reproduction, or fecundity dynamics, will determine how vulnerable the animal is to many of the same factors that shaped the dynamics in the first place. In this study, we tested how individual fecundity dynamics influence vulnerability of female fecundity to the deleterious environmental factors. We injured Drosophila melanogaster females at various moments during periods before and after mating. Injuries are prevalent in nature and provide a punctuated stimulus, making them particularly well suited to study their connection with the dynamics of reproduction. Our aim was to determine periods of vulnerability and impact of wounds on female fitness resulting from the change. The observed fecundity dynamics exhibited a high early peak in offspring production, suggesting that early after mating females might be particularly vulnerable to environmental conditions. However, females produced the same number of offspring, regardless of the time of injury, suggesting that fitness of female Drosophila is robust to wounds inflicted under laboratory conditions.