OFFSPRING SIZE EFFECTS MEDIATE COMPETITIVE INTERACTIONS IN A COLONIAL MARINE INVERTEBRATE

Offspring size effects mediate competitive interactions in a colonial marine invertebrate.

Over the past 30 years, numerous attempts to understand the relationship between offspring size and fitness have been made, and it has become clear that this critical relationship is strongly affected by environmental heterogeneity. For marine invertebrates, there has been a long-standing interest in the evolution of offspring size, but there have been very few empirical and theoretical examina...

Offspring Size Affects the Post-metamorphic Performance of a Colonial Marine Invertebrate

The positive relationship between offspring size and offspring fitness is a fundamental assumption of life-history theory, but it has received relatively little attention in the marine environment. This is surprising given that substantial intraspecific variation in offspring size is common in marine organisms and there are clear links between larval experience and adult performance. The metamo...

For Peer Review 1 Offspring size effects across multiple life - history stages 1 in a marine invertebrate

Size-specific predation on marine invertebrate larvae.

Predation on planktonic larval stages is frequently a major source of mortality for the offspring of benthic marine invertebrates. Mortality rate likely varies with larval size and developmental stage, but few experiments have measured how these factors affect predation rates. I used experimental reductions in egg size to test how variation in larval size affects the likelihood of predation dur...

Larval size and age affect colonization in a marine invertebrate.

The relationship between offspring size and performance determines the optimal trade-off between producing many small offspring or fewer large offspring and the existence of this relationship has become a central tenet of life-history theory. For organisms with multiple life-history stages, the relationship between offspring size and performance is determined by the effects of offspring size in...