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During a cool or an unusually cold year, the mortality rate will be higher than usual. Food can be scarce or even non-existent if it's a record cold year, and starvation and cold take their toll. A normally large population of leopards could end up with half their normal numbers. No matter how many died off, you really need all the eggs you can produce to get the local group going again (survival of the species and all that tech talk). A male will be able to 'service' a lot of females, but a female can only produce a given number of eggs. If the population is low, you want more females to produce a larger than normal number of eggs next year. So, if the ground temperature is low, the weather above ground is not ideal, you can expect a lot of females to hatch, getting ready to produce more eggs next year. Hopefully the weather will have returned to near normal by then. If it does continue on the cold side, you still have a higher ratio of females to start with since more of them hatched this first cold year, and hopefully more females than males survive to produce eggs the next year.
If the weather is normal you get a pretty even ratio. If it's warmer than normal, things can be a bit rough, but not as bad as the cold weather. Either normal or warmer, chances are food is still plentiful, nobody will starve, and you can time your outings to the cooler night times.... so there's no need for a lot of females to produce record numbers of eggs. It's a prime time for producing males to wander far and wide, spread their genes to other populations, start colonies in new areas, help diversify the Gene Pool.
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Hybrid Mode
