Abstract: One of the fundamental principles of life history trait theory is the existence of trade-offs. The amount of energy available to living beings is a limited resource that must be shared among different biological functions. The combination of traits best suited to ecological constraints will be selected.
Growth is a crucial phase during which the future phenotype of the adult is established. This period between birth and the acquisition of independence from parents is characterized by very fast stature and weight growth and tissue maturation, particularly in bone and muscle. This phenomenon is marked by sustained parental nutrition. On an intraspecific scale, variations in individual chick growth may reflect the quality/experience of the parents. In some species, parental dietary intake may, regardless of quality, show wide seasonal fluctuations due to environmental changes and for developing individuals the quantity and quality of nutrients ingested and metabolized may be a limiting factor in growth. There is little information to understand the trade-offs in energy allocation that will be established to ensure survival and growth of the young in the case of inadequate dietary intakes.
The king penguin chick is an atypical animal model for the study of these strategies. This seabird has an unusually long one-year development cycle for a bird and its growth is interrupted by a period of severe food restriction during the 4 months of the southern winter. In addition, exceptionally with a penguin, the period of initiation of reproduction is asynchronous and extends over several months. A direct consequence is a shorter time of accumulation of energy reserves in late-born chicks. We aim to determine whether the particularly long cycle of this chick and the environmental constraints to which it is subjected result in particular adaptations in terms of the relative development of the two muscle belts, pelvic and pectoral, and whether this growth compromise is expressed in the same way in early and late born chicks.