Influence of maternal characteristics and reproductive history on recruitment in an iteroparous ungulate

In reproductive dynamics, recruitment is a critical biological process to ensure populations remain viable. While extrinsic factors such as predation and environmental factors (e.g., droughts) have been found to strongly influence recruitment, knowledge gaps still exist on how maternal factors such as age, body size, and past reproductive history influence recruitment. We examined a captive population of white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) with a known pedigree exhibiting natural breeding behavior from 2008 to 2019, and compared annual recruitment data of individuals relative to a mother’s age, lifetime body size percentile (LBP), and past reproductive history. We found that recruitment success increased up to 6.5 years of age before declining in older age classes. We also found that age and LBP had a significant interaction such that large-bodied females had high recruitment success at younger ages that peaked around 4.5 years of age, while small-bodied females had low recruitment success at young ages and high recruitment success at older ages. We also found females that recruited a fawn in the previous year recruited 1.46 times as many fawns than females that did not recruit a fawn the year prior. We documented 40 individuals (47% of mothers) that recruited fawns in consecutive years at least once in their lifetime, and those individuals recruited 75.3% of all fawns during the study. Our findings suggest that age of peak recruitment varies based on body size, and a minority of females in a population successfully recruit a majority of the fawns into the breeding population.