Dispersal as a source of variation in age-specific reproductive strategies in a wild population of lizards

Dispersal syndromes describe patterns of covariation of morphological, behavioral and life history traits associated with dispersal. Studying dispersal syndromes is critical to understanding the demographic and genetic consequences of movements. Among studies describing the association of life history traits with dispersal, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that dispersal syndromes can vary with age. Recent theory also suggests that dispersive and philopatric individuals might have different age-specific reproductive efforts. In a wild population of the common lizard (Zootoca vivipara), we investigated whether dispersive and philopatric individuals have different age-specific reproductive effort, survival, offspring body condition and offspring sex ratio. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we found that young dispersive females have a higher reproductive effort than young philopatric females. Our results also suggest that the early high investment in reproduction of dispersiv...