on mating and dispersal strategies

摘要: 1 Animals are assumed to adopt mating strategies that maximize expected lifetime reproductive output, which can be modelled by dividing life histories into three stages: dependency on parents, dispersal and reproduction. 2 Resource productivity affects reproductive output but animals also respond to variances in resource productivity. Because reproductive output responds in a diminishing returns fashion to increasing resource productivity, resource variance can be modelled as a discount on mean resource productivity. 3 The resource productivity-variance model is developed for mammals, incorporating dependence of reproductive output on resource productivity and on variance in that productivity in space (resource patchiness) and in time (resource predictability). For given resource characteristics, the model can be used to predict optimal mating and dispersal strategies. Examples are given for the eight …