Why do animals have mating seasons instead of just mating whenever like us?

Question

Wouldn’t it be more of a survival advantage to give birth at any time of year instead of just a highly competitive window of time?

In: 3

Answer 1

Because animals are impacted by their environment. Take a zebra as an example: It wouldn’t make much sense to bear offspring in a dry season. They’ll have to wait for rainfalls. Now take the Lion as an example: It doesn’t make much sense to bear offspring when Zebras don’t bear offspring that the Lions could hunt and feed their offspring on. So they’ll wait until the Zebras have offspring.

There is a great example about the egg laying date in Great Tits and how it’s synchronised to the emergence of caterpillars. (Nussey et al., 2005, Charmantier et al., 2008, Vedder et al., 2013)