Abstract
OPTIMIZATION models have been widely and successfully used in evolutionary ecology to predict the attributes of organisms1á¤-6. Most such models maximize darwinian fitness (or a component of fitness) in the face of trade-offs and constraints; the numerical results usually depend on the exact form of the trade-offs/constraints. Here we report the first (to our knowledge) numerical optimum for life-history evolution which is independent of the details of the underlying trade-off, for a large array for trade-off forms. The rule is that at small litter sizes, the range in offsping size is inversely proportional to the size of the litter. Details of the offspring-survival/offspring-size trade-off7á¤-10 set the value of the proportionality constant, but the á¤-1 exponent, the inverse proportionality itself, is universal. Studies of life histories have yielded many empirical examples of universality for various scaling exponents6 (for example, adult lifespan scales as ≈0.25 with adult body mass within many taxa); this is an example of the numerical value of an exponent (here á¤- 1) emerging from a life-history model as independent of all but a few general features of the underlying economic structure.
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Charnov, E., Downhower, J. A trade-off-invariant life-history rule for optimal offspring size. Nature 376, 418–419 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1038/376418a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/376418a0
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