Endothermic and ectothermic amniotes differ in the timing of reproductive onset, with reptiles initiating reproduction before reaching final body size. Long-term consequences of maternal effect for early reptile offspring are poorly explored. We conducted growth experiments to compare the growth of offspring produced by young and older females of gecko Paroedura picta. Young, not fully grown females lay smaller eggs leading to production of smaller offspring. These offspring undergo accelerated growth and ultimately reach a comparable sex-specific final body length as do offspring of older females. Final body length is thus canalized with respect to the maternal effect on egg size. Notably, the offspring of young mothers have a tendency towards larger body mass. Ontogeny of the offspring of young females shares similarities with that of mammalian offspring with low birth weight or early malnutrition, exhibiting catch-up growth and a predisposition to obesity. We highlight the important consequences of early reproduction for offspring in animals that initiate reproduction prior to reaching final body size. Both life-history models and conservation practices should take into account that female lizards might produce the most fit offspring only between reaching their final body length and the onset of reproductive senescence.

Department of Ecology Faculty of Science Charles University Viničná 7 Prague Czech Republic

Department of Zoology Faculty of Science Charles University Viničná 7 Prague Czech Republic

See more in PubMed

Kozlowski J, Uchmanski J. 1987. Optimal individual growth and reproduction in perennial species with indeterminate growth. Evol. Ecol. 1, 214-230. (10.1007/bf02067552) DOI

Stamps JA, Mangel M, Phillips JA. 1998. A new look at relationships between size at maturity and asymptotic size. Am. Nat. 152, 470-479. (10.1086/286183) PubMed DOI

Frýdlová P, et al. 2020. Determinate growth is predominant and likely ancestral in squamate reptiles. Proc. R. Soc. B 287, 20202737. (10.1098/rspb.2020.2737) PubMed DOI PMC

Kubička L, Tureček A, Kučera T, Kratochvíl L. 2022. Sex-specific growth arrest in a lizard. iScience 25, 104041. (10.1016/j.isci.2022.104041) PubMed DOI PMC

Congdon JD, Gibbons JW. 1987. Morphological constraint on egg size: a challenge to optimal egg size theory? Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 84, 4145-4147. (10.1073/pnas.84.12.4145) PubMed DOI PMC

Roth ED, Johnson JA. 2004. Size-based variation in antipredator behavior within a snake (Agkistrodon piscivorus) population. Behav. Ecol. 15, 365-370. (10.1093/beheco/arh024) DOI

Kratochvíl L, Frynta D. 2006. Body-size effect on egg size in eublepharid geckos (Squamata: Eublepharidae), lizards with invariant clutch size: negative allometry for egg size in ectotherms is not universal. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 88, 527-532. (10.1111/j.1095-8312.2006.00627.x) DOI

Daza J, Herrera A, Richard T, Hector C. 2009. Are you what you eat? A geometric morphometric analysis of gekkotan skull shape. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 97, 677-707. (10.1111/j.1095-8312.2009.01242.x) DOI

Pafilis P, Meiri S, Foufopoulos J, Valakos E. 2009. Intraspecific competition and high food availability are associated with insular gigantism in a lizard. Sci. Nat. 96, 1107-1113. (10.1007/s00114-009-0564-3) PubMed DOI

Escalona T, Dean A, Valenzuela N. 2018. A lengthy solution to the optimal propagule size problem in the large-bodied South American freshwater turtle, Podocnemis unifilis. Evol. Ecol. 32, 29-41. (10.1007/s10682-017-9922-3) DOI

White C, Phillips N, Seymour R. 2006. The scaling and temperature dependence of vertebrate metabolism. Biol. Lett. 2, 125-127. (10.1098/rsbl.2005.0378) PubMed DOI PMC

Gavrilov VM, Golubeva TB, Bushuev A. 2022. Evolution of metabolic scaling among the tetrapod: effect of phylogeny, the geologic time of class formation, and uniformity of species within a class. Integr. Zool. 17, 904-917. (10.1111/1749-4877.12611) PubMed DOI

Werner J, Griebeler EM. 2014. Allometries of maximum growth rate versus body mass at maximum growth indicate that non-avian dinosaurs had growth rates typical of fast growing ectothermic sauropsids. PLoS ONE 9, e88834. (10.1371/journal.pone.0088834) PubMed DOI PMC

Schönecker P. 2008. Geckos of Madagascar, the Seychelles, Comoros and Mascarene Islands. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Edition Chimaira.

Meter B, Starostová Z, Kubička L, Kratochvíl L. 2020. The limits of the energetical perspective: life-history decisions in lizard growth. Evol. Ecol. 34, 469-481. (10.1007/s10682-020-10054-0) DOI

Microsoft Corporation. 2018. Microsoft Excel. See https://office.microsoft.com/excel.

R Core Team. 2023. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Wood SN. 2011. Fast stable restricted maximum likelihood and marginal likelihood estimation of semiparametric generalized linear models. J. R. Stat. Soc. B 73, 3-36. (10.1111/j.1467-9868.2010.00749.x) DOI

Bates D, Mächler M, Bolker B, Walker S. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. J. Stat. Softw. 67, 1-48. (10.18637/jss.v067.i01) DOI

Wickham H. 2016. Ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.

Kuznetsova A, Brockhoff PB, Christensen RHB. 2017. lmerTest package: tests in linear mixed effects models. J. Stat. Softw. 82, 1-26. (10.18637/jss.v082.i13) DOI

Lenth R, Singmann H.Love J, Buerkner P, Herve M. 2018. Package ‘Emmeans’. R package version 4.0-3. See http://cran.r-project.org/package=emmeans.

Bartoń K. 2023. Package ‘MuMIn’. R package version 1.47.5. See https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MuMIn/.

Clarke E, Sherrill-Mix S, Dawson C. 2023. Package ‘ggbeeswarm’. R package version 0.7.2. See https://github.com/eclarke/ggbeeswarm.

Pedersen EJ, Miller DL, Simpson GL, Ross N. 2019. Hierarchical generalized additive models in ecology: an introduction with mgcv. PeerJ 7, e6876. (10.7717/peerj.6876) PubMed DOI PMC

Burnham KP, Anderson DR, Huyvaert KP. 2011. AIC model selection and multimodel inference in behavioral ecology: some background, observations, and comparisons. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 65, 23-35. (10.1007/s00265-010-1029-6) DOI

Symonds MRE, Moussalli A. 2011. A brief guide to model selection, multimodel inference and model averaging in behavioural ecology using Akaike's information criterion. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 65, 13-21. (10.1007/s00265-010-1037-6) DOI

Taggart PL, Morris S, Caraguel CGB. 2021. The impact of PIT tags on the growth and survival of pythons is insignificant in randomised controlled trial. PeerJ 9, e11531. (10.7717/peerj.11531) PubMed DOI PMC

Kratochvíl L, Kubička L. 2007. Why reduce clutch size to one or two eggs? Reproductive allometries reveal different evolutionary causes of invariant clutch size in lizards. Funct. Ecol. 21, 171-177. (10.1111/j.1365-2435.2006.01202.x) DOI

Kubička L, Kratochvíl L. 2009. First grow, then breed and finally get fat: Hierarchical allocation to life-history traits in a lizard with invariant clutch size. Funct. Ecol. 23, 595-601. (10.1111/j.1365-2435.2008.01518.x) DOI

Starostová Z, Angilletta MJ, Kubička L, Kratochvíl L. 2012. Thermal dependence of reproductive allocation in a tropical lizard. J. Therm. Biol. 37, 159-163. (10.1016/j.jtherbio.2011.12.009) DOI

Radder RS, Warner DA, Shine R. 2007. Compensating for a bad start: catch-up growth in juvenile lizards (Amphibolurus muricatus, Agamidae). J. Exp. Zool. 307A, 500-508. (10.1002/jez.403) PubMed DOI

Xie QS, Yang ZC, Li JW, Ji YJ. 2012. Effect of protein restriction with subsequent re-alimentation on compensatory growth of juvenile soft-shelled turtles (Pelodiscus sinensis). Aquacult. Int. 20, 19-27. (10.1007/s10499-011-9438-8) DOI

Holden KG, Reding DM, Ford NB, Bronikowski AM. 2019. Effects of early nutritional stress on physiology, life histories and their trade-offs in a model ectothermic vertebrate. J. Exp. Biol. 222, jeb200220. (10.1242/jeb.200220) PubMed DOI

Bjorndal KA, Bolten AB, Dellinger T, Delgado C, Martins HR. 2003. Compensatory growth in oceanic loggerhead sea turtles: response to a stochastic environment. Ecology 84, 1237-1249. (10.1890/0012-9658(2003)084[1237:CGIOLS]2.0.CO;2) DOI

Metcalfe NB, Monaghan P. 2001. Compensation for a bad start: grow now, pay later? Trends Ecol. Evol. 16, 254-260. (10.1016/S0169-5347(01)02124-3) PubMed DOI

Kratochvíl L, Frynta D. 2002. Body size, male combat and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in eublepharid geckos (Squamata: Eublepharidae). Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 76, 303-314. (10.1111/j.1095-8312.2002.tb02089.x) DOI

Michaud EJ, Echternacht AC. 1995. Geographic variation in the life history of the lizard Anolis carolinensis and support for the pelvic constraint model. J. Herpetol. 29, 86-97. (10.2307/1565090) DOI

Platt SG, Sovannara H, Kheng L, Holloway R, Stuart BL, Rainwater TR. 2008. Biodiversity, exploitation, and conservation of turtles in the Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve, Cambodia, with notes on reproductive ecology of Malayemys subtrijuga. Chelonian Conser. Biol 7, 195-204. (10.2744/CCB-0703.1) DOI

Ljubisavljević K, Glasnović P, Kalan K, Kryštufek B. 2012. Female reproductive characteristics of the Horvath's rock lizard (Iberolacerta horvathi) from Slovenia. Arch. Biol. Sci. 64, 639-645. (10.2298/ABS1202639L) DOI

Criscuolo F, Monaghan P, Nasir L, Metcalfe NB. 2008. Early nutrition and phenotypic development: ‘catch-up’ growth leads to elevated metabolic rate in adulthood. Proc. Biol. Sci. 275, 1565-1570. (10.1098/rspb.2008.0148) PubMed DOI PMC

Martin A, Connelly A, Bland RM, Reilly JJ. 2013. Health impact of catch-up growth in low-birth weight infants: systematic review, evidence appraisal, and meta-analysis. Matern. Child Nutr. 13, e12297. (10.1111/mcn.12297) PubMed DOI PMC

Oke SL, Sohi G, Hardy DB. 2020. Perinatal protein restriction with postnatal catch-up growth leads to elevated p66Shc and mitochondrial dysfunction in the adult rat liver. Reproduction 159, 27-39. (10.1530/REP-19-0188) PubMed DOI PMC

Ferguson GW, Fox SF. 1984. Annual variation of survival advantage of large juvenile side-blotched lizards, Uta stansburiana: its causes and evolutionary significance. Evolution 38, 342-349. (10.2307/2408492) PubMed DOI

Sinervo B. 1990. The evolution of maternal investment in lizards: an experimental and comparative analysis of egg size and its effects on offspring performance. Evolution 44, 279-294. (10.1111/j.1558-5646.1990.tb05198.x) PubMed DOI

Starostová Z, Píchová V, Bauerová A, Kubička L, Kratochvíl L. 2024. Catch-up growth and overweight adults in the offspring of young gecko mothers resembling low birth weight infants. Figshare. (10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6996720) PubMed DOI

Catch-up growth and overweight adults in the offspring of young gecko mothers resembling low birth weight infants