In my work with coastal plains milk snakes I have noted over the years that smaller breeding females produce fewer eggs per clutch (not surprising) but also larger eggs and neonates than the progeny of more “robust” aggressive feeding females. I often wondered if there was not some kind of survival mechanism going on in this instance. I fleshed out the thought like this:
In a food rich environment the survival of an organism might best be served by producing a large number of offspring to exploit the resource and increase odds of at least some surviving predation.
In less food rich environments the survival of an organism might be best served by producing fewer but large neonates. These larger neonates would not only be better able to exploit scarce resources, but would be better able to disperse in the search for them and, given larger size would have an advantage up moving up the food web instead of through it.
I don’t know if there is any truth to this theory but when working with a small species one tends to fantasize about ways to increase the size of hatchlings. Other than for the first month out of hibernation, I do not “power feed” my coastals and as a result my females generally lay 6 – 8 eggs per year. This is far fewer than what many report especially from northern populations such as NJ stock. The up side for me is that an appreciable number of the neonates are large enough to take new born pinks right out of the egg and I can generally get the others up to size by tease feeding mouse tails twice a week for 6 – 7 weeks.
Since adopting this strategy I have not lost a single coastal neonate to not being able to get them to feed. As I’ve not done any controlled experiments, I’m not sure if this is the result of a real size difference in the neonates, having more time per neonate to get them feeding or a combination of both. The up side however is that coastals have fallen off the hart to work with list.
