The ecology of gestational growth in a wild cooperative mammal

In wild mammals, early postnatal growth strongly affects offspring survival and fitness, but little is known about the causes and consequences of variation in prenatal growth. We investigated whether gestational weight gains vary according to maternal traits and social and environmental conditions, and how prenatal growth affects the fates of the resulting offspring, using an exceptionally large sample of repeated pregnant body weight records from individually recognisable wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta). Pregnant meerkats’ body weights remained stable during the first half of gestation and then increased linearly until they gave birth. Gestational weight gains were more rapid under favourable environmental conditions and when mothers were experimentally food-supplemented, suggesting that nutrition strongly determines prenatal growth. While social conditions and reproductive competition shape postnatal growth in many social vertebrates (including meerkats), these factors had a limite..., , # The ecology of gestational growth in a wild cooperative mammal

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.j6q573nv5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j6q573nv5)

## Description of the data and file structure

The following R code and data are presented in support of our paper 'The ecology of gestational growth in a wild cooperative mammal', published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

The R code was produced by Dr Jack Thorley and relies extensively on the use of the tidyverse suite for data wrangling and plotting ([https://www.tidyverse.org/packages/](https://www.tidyverse.org/packages/)), and the brms package for the fitting of Bayesian hierarchical models ([https://paul-buerkner.github.io/brms/](https://paul-buerkner.github.io/brms/)). The Variance inflation functions come directly from Zuur et al.'s 2009 book *Mixed Effects Models with Extensions in Ecology with R*.

Also, please note that all identifying information (ReprodRef, FemaleID, GroupRef, PupID) has been anonymised within this analysis. ...,