Data from: Maternal effects and the legacy of extreme environmental events for wild mammals

Nutrition underpins population dynamics of large herbivores. The
environmental, physiological, and nutritional state of a mother can have a
lifetime effect on her offspring. For ungulates, nutrition of the mother
during gestation can have an important and often underappreciated effect
on the lifetime phenotype, behavior, and success of her offspring.
Research in captive settings has shown even with animals that are closely
related (i.e., have similar genetic makeups), maternal condition can have
serious lifetime implications for an animal’s offspring; mothers in poor
condition give birth to sons that exhibit stunted growth compared with
sons born to mothers in good condition. Yet, identifying the role of
maternal effects in wild animals can be difficult. It requires information
on the nutritional legacy of a mother in combination with information on
current environmental conditions. We evaluated how nutrition of a mother
potentially affected her male offspring's lifetime trajectory using
ingesta-free body fat measurements of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) in
the Wyoming Range of western Wyoming, USA. Following a very harsh winter,
one female gave birth to a male who remained small for the entirety of his
lifetime, which may be attributed to the nutritional stress his mother
experienced during that winter. This dataset includes the means and
standard errors of IFBFat for female deer captured in March from 2013–2021
and for male deer captured in December from 2018–2021.