Testing secondary sex ratio bias hypotheses in white-tailed deer in Mississippi, USA.

Natural selection favors individuals with the highest inclusive fitness (i.e., total number of descendants).

Rutting and rambling: Movement characteristics reveal partial migration in adult male white-tailed deer at a latitude void of chronic and severe environmental fluctuations.

White-tailed deer () are generally considered a home-ranging species, although northern populations may migrate between summer and winter ranges to balance resource requirements with environmental stressors. We evaluated annual home range characteristics of adult bucks ( = 30) fitted with GPS collars from 2017 to 2021 in central Mississippi with time series segmentation and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to determine if individuals employed varying movement strategies. We found 67% of bucks displayed a "sedentary" strategy characterized by a single KDE home range polygon with a mean size of 361 ha.

Cohort antler size signals environmental stress in a moderate climate.

Research in northern latitudes confirms that climate teleconnections exert important influences on ungulate fitness, but studies from regions with milder climates are lacking. We explored the influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on male, 2.5-year-old white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) antler and body mass in Mississippi, USA, a region with mild winters and warm, humid summers.