Data from: Female Soay sheep do not adjust their maternal care behaviour to the quality of their home range

Resource availability, through its impact on the costs and benefits of parental care, is expected to influence parental care behaviour. There has, to our knowledge, been no attempt to understand how variation in the resource use of wild individuals influences individual parental care behaviour. To understand how natural resource variability affects maternal care in female St. Kilda Soay sheep, we selected 69 females whose home ranges varied in quality (measured as the mean percentage cover of Holcus lanatus), and recorded the behaviour of each individual and her lamb over the period of maternal care. Home range quality did not influence suckling or non-suckling behaviours of the female or her lamb, suggesting that maternal care did not vary with a female’s access to resources. Growth rate analyses confirmed the behavioural results, with no association between home range quality and the weight gain of lambs between birth and weaning. This work suggests that female Soay sheep faced with poorer resources do not favour their own future success over that of their lamb, and thereby do not exhibit a conservative reproductive strategy. This may be because when resource levels are high during the summer, females are able to offset the costs of lactation by consuming additional resources, regardless of the location of their home range. Our results suggest that more studies characterizing the environment experienced by individual animals will be necessary to fully understand how individuals alter their behaviour in response to temporal and spatial variation in the environment.资源可获得性通过影响亲代抚育（parental care）的成本与收益，被认为会调控亲代抚育行为。据我们所知，目前尚无研究探讨野生个体的资源利用差异如何影响其亲代抚育行为。 为探究自然资源可变性如何影响圣基达岛索艾羊（St. Kilda Soay sheep）的雌性亲代抚育行为，我们选取了69只家域质量存在差异的雌性个体，其家域质量以绒毛草（Holcus lanatus）的平均盖度百分比进行量化，并在亲代抚育期间记录了每只雌性个体及其幼崽的行为表现。 家域质量并未对雌性个体及其幼崽的哺乳与非哺乳行为产生影响，这表明雌性的亲代抚育行为并未随其资源可获得性的变化而改变。生长速率分析验证了行为学研究结果：家域质量与幼崽从出生到断奶的体重增益之间无显著关联。 本研究结果表明，当面临资源匮乏状况时，索艾羊雌性个体并不会优先保障自身未来的繁殖收益，而非幼崽的存活，因此并未采取保守型繁殖策略。这一现象可能源于夏季资源丰度较高时，无论家域位置如何，雌性个体均可通过摄取额外资源来弥补泌乳所消耗的能量成本。 本研究结果提示，未来需开展更多针对个体动物所处环境特征的研究，以全面解析个体如何响应环境的时空变化进而调整自身行为。