When environmental conditions vary stochastically, individuals accrue fitness benefits by exhibiting phenotypic plasticity. Here we analyze a general dynamic-programming model describing an individual's optimal energy allocation in a stochastic environment. After maturation, individuals repeatedly decide how to allocate incoming energy between reproduction and maintenance. We analyze the optima...

Human reproductive ecology is a relatively new subfield of human evolutionary biology focusing on the responsiveness of the human reproductive system to ecological variables. Many of the advances in human, and more recently primate, reproductive ecology concern the influence of energetics on the allocation of reproductive effort. This paper reviews eleven working hypotheses that have emerged fr...

The way organisms allocate their resources to growth and reproduction are key attributes differentiating life histories. Many organisms spawn multiple times in a breeding season, but few studies have investigated the impact of serial spawning on reproductive allocation. This study investigated whether resource allocation was influenced by parental characteristics and prior spawning history in a...

Due to their haplo-diploid sex determination system and the resulting conflict over optimal sex allocation between queens and workers, social Hymenoptera have become important model species to study variation in sex allocation. While many studies indeed reported sex allocation to be affected by social factors such as colony kin structure or queen number, others, however, found that sex allocati...

Life histories in Mediterranean pines are well known to be closely related to different fire and disturbance regimes. Variation in these factors is also reflected in reproductive strategies at the specific and intraspecific level. Specifically, the onset of reproduction is a crucial stage for any organism because it has profound implications on fitness. In this paper we focus on the intraspecif...

A time-dependent model of energy flow in post-settlement oyster populations is used to examine the factors that influence adult size and reproductive effort in a particular habitat, Galveston Bay, Texas, and in habitats that extend from Laguna Madre,. Texas to Chesapeake Bay. The simulated populations show that adult size and reproductive effort are detennined by the allocation of net productio...

Theory predicts the optimal timing of sex change will be the age or size at which half of an individual's expected fitness comes through reproduction as a male and half through reproduction as a female. In this way, sex allocation across the lifetime of a sequential hermaphrodite parallels the sex allocation of an outbreeding species exhibiting a 1:1 ratio of sons to daughters. However, the exp...