Predation risk and life histories
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2019
Department/School
Biology
Publication Title
Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior
Abstract
Life histories are how organisms grow, survive, and reproduce over time. Organisms face many trade-offs between growing, surviving, and reproducing. These trade-offs are key to understanding the diversity of life histories in the world. Growing for a longer time requires later reproduction. Growing faster or reproducing at a higher rate generally decreases survival. Within reproduction, organisms face a trade-off between the number and size of offspring they can produce. Predation risk interacts with all elements of life histories since the behaviors needed for greater growth or reproduction generally lead to greater predation risk. Experiments, and situations resembling experiments, confirm the importance of predators to the evolution of life histories.
Link to Published Version
Recommended Citation
Bednekoff, P. A. (2019). Predation risk and life histories. In Encyclopedia of animal behavior (pp. 334–339). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809633-8.90113-4