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Life history traits used in our analysis to describe the life history strategies of a given animal population The circle represents the life course of a cohort from birth (0 yr) clockwise to death, with each different coloured concentric band describing the sequence and timing of life history events, quantified using the metrics described in the boxes. For more information on how these were calculated see Supplementary Methods.
Source publication
Animals exhibit an extraordinary diversity of life history strategies. These realized combinations of survival, development and reproduction are predicted to be constrained by physiological limitations and by trade-offs in resource allocation. However, our understanding of these patterns is restricted to a few taxonomic groups. Using demographic da...
Citations
... Fitness is optimized differently in different species, and local selection pressure has shaped specific trade-offs on life-history traits such as those related to reproduction and survival, thereby defining the pace-of-life of species [37]. Several studies have therefore tested the relationship between HbA1c levels and individuals' reproduction in birds. ...
Glycation reactions play a key role in the senescence process and are involved in numerous age-related pathologies, such as diabetes complications or Alzheimer’s disease. As a result, past studies on glycation have mostly focused on human and laboratory animal models for medical purposes. Very little is known about glycation and its link to senescence in wild animal species. Yet, despite feeding on high-sugar diets, several bat and bird species are long-lived and seem to escape the toxic effects of high glycaemia. The study of these models could open new avenues both for understanding the mechanisms that coevolved with glycation resistance and for treating the damaging effects of glycations in humans. Our understanding of glycaemia’s correlation to proxies of animals’ pace of life is emerging in few wild species; however, virtually nothing is known about their resistance to glycation, nor on the relationship between glycation, species’ life-history traits and individual fitness. Our review summarizes the scarce current knowledge on the links between glycation and life-history traits in non-conventional animal models, highlighting the predominance of avian research. We also investigate some key molecular and physiological parameters involved in glycation regulation, which hold promise for future research on fitness and senescence of individuals.
... This genetic basis could link behavioral expression with life history, as indicated in one of the key hypotheses explaining why individual variation in behaviors and physiological traits exists Réale et al., 2010). In this pace-of-life (POL) framework, one of the most studied life-history continua is the fast-slow continuum which can explain as much as 70% of life-history variation among animal species (Healy et al., 2019). This framework was also expanded to explain behavioral variation within species and populations so that life-history variation explains behavioral variation in a predictable manner Laskowski et al., 2021;Montiglio et al., 2018). ...
Studies linking genetics, behavior and life history in any species are rare. In Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), age at maturity is a key life‐history trait and associates strongly with the vgll3 locus, whereby the vgll3*E allele is linked with younger age at maturity, and higher body condition than the vgll3*L allele. However, the relationship between this genetic variation and behaviors like boldness and exploration which may impact growth and reproductive strategies is poorly understood. The pace‐of‐life syndrome (POLS) framework provides predictions, whereby heightened exploratory behavior and boldness are predicted in individuals with the early maturation‐associated vgll3 genotype (EE). Here, we tested these predictions by investigating the relationship between vgll3 genotypes and exploration and boldness behaviors in 129 juveniles using the novel environment and novel object trials. Our results indicated that contrary to POLS predictions, vgll3*LL fish were bolder and more explorative, suggesting a genotype‐level syndrome including several behaviors. Interestingly, clear sex differences were observed in the latency to move in a new environment, with vgll3*EE males, but not females, taking longer to move than their vgll3*LL counterparts. Our results provide further empirical support for recent calls to consider more nuanced explanations than the pace of life theory for integrating behavior into life‐history theory.
... Accounting for variation in life histories among individuals, populations or species is a central challenge in evolutionary biology [1][2][3]. A key to understand this variation is to recognize that individuals have limited resources to allocate to traits. ...
When males compete, sexual selection favors reproductive traits that increase their mating or fertilization success (pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection). It is assumed that males face a trade-off between these 2 types of sexual traits because they both draw from the same pool of resources. Consequently, allocation into mate acquisition or ejaculation should create similar trade-offs with other key life history traits. Tests of these assumptions are exceedingly rare. Males only ejaculate after they mate, and the costs of ejaculation are therefore highly confounded with those of mating effort. Consequently, little is known about how each component of reproductive allocation affects a male’s future performance. Here, we ran an experiment using a novel technique to distinguish the life history costs of mating effort and ejaculation for mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki). We compared manipulated males (mate without ejaculation), control males (mate and ejaculate), and naïve males (neither mate nor ejaculate) continuously housed with a female and 2 rival males. We assessed their growth, somatic maintenance, mating and fighting behavior, and sperm traits after 8 and 16 weeks. Past mating effort significantly lowered a male’s future mating effort and growth, but not his sperm production, while past sperm release significantly lowered a male’s future ejaculate quantity, but not his mating effort. Immune response was the only trait impacted by both past mating effort and past ejaculation. These findings challenge the assumption that male reproductive allocation draws from a common pool of resources to generate similar life history costs later in life. Instead, we provide clear evidence that allocation into traits under pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection have different trait-specific effects on subsequent male reproductive performance.
... Despite this wide ecological radiation (Grossnickle et al., 2019), evolutionary history and energetic constraints limit the set of life history strategies (i.e., combinations of life history traits) that are viable in nature (Grime & Pierce, 2012;Stearns, 1992). These limits restrict mammalian investments in survival, growth, and reproduction to two major dimensions of life history trait variation Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019;Oli, 2004). The first dimension generally encompasses the time scale of life, referred to as the fast-slow continuum (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019;Stearns, 1992). ...
... These limits restrict mammalian investments in survival, growth, and reproduction to two major dimensions of life history trait variation Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019;Oli, 2004). The first dimension generally encompasses the time scale of life, referred to as the fast-slow continuum (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019;Stearns, 1992). In contrast, the second dimension depends more on the subset of species and traits considered, but generally reflects the timing and intensity of a species' reproductive investment (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019). ...
... The first dimension generally encompasses the time scale of life, referred to as the fast-slow continuum (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019;Stearns, 1992). In contrast, the second dimension depends more on the subset of species and traits considered, but generally reflects the timing and intensity of a species' reproductive investment (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989;Healy et al., 2019). While these two life history dimensions are consistently observed across studies with various species and trait subsets (Bielby et al., 2007;Capdevila et al., 2020;Gaillard et al., 1989), we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how mammals are organised within this broad life history space. ...
Mammalian life history strategies can be characterised by a few axes of variation, conforming a space where species are positioned based on the life history strategies favoured in the environment they exploit. Yet, we still lack global descriptions of the diversity of realised mammalian life history and how this diversity is shaped by the environment. We used six life history traits to build a life history space covering worldwide mammalian adaptation, and we explored how environmental realms (land, air, water) influence mammalian life history strategies. We demonstrate that realms are tightly linked to distinct life history strategies. Aquatic and aerial species predominantly adhere to slower life history strategies, while terrestrial species exhibit faster life histories. Highly encephalised terrestrial species are a notable exception to these patterns. Furthermore, we show that different mode of life may play a significant role in expanding the set of strategies exploitable in the terrestrial realm. Additionally, species transitioning between terrestrial and aquatic realms, such as seals, exhibit intermediate life history strategies. Our results provide compelling evidence of the link between environmental realms and the life history diversity of mammals, highlighting the importance of differences in mode of life to expand life history diversity.
... Rademaker et al. (2024) used principal component analysis (PCA) to partition the variation in physiological traits, reproductive decisions and responses to environmental change at the population level into three main axes that explained 78% of the total variation in their data. The two main axes corresponded to the slow-fast and reproductive strategies, as has been observed in previous studies working on a different set of species (Capdevila et al., 2020;Healy et al., 2019;Salguero-Gómez et al., 2016). However, this also means that the individual-level trade-offs implemented in the DEB-IPMs With this study, Rademaker and coauthors therefore provide empirical evidence for a decoupling of individual-level and populationlevel trade-offs and challenge current evidence of the pace of life and reproductive output explaining environmental sensitivity (Compagnoni et al., 2021;Jackson et al., 2022;Morris et al., 2008;Paniw et al., 2018). ...
Research Highlight: Rademaker, M., van Leeuwen, A., & Smallegange, I. M. (2024). Why we cannot always expect life history strategies to directly inform on sensitivity to environmental change. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.14050. Ecological studies have long delved into how organisms allocate energy between reproduction and somatic maintenance to maximize fitness. This allocation gives rise to various life‐history strategies, and these strategies have been shown to predict how populations respond to environmental change, allowing us to generalize potential responses to increasing human pressures. Such predictions have, however, been made for a limited set of terrestrial taxa and typically do not explore how individual differences in life‐history responses to environmental change scale to affect population‐level responses. Using novel data on diverse fish species, Rademaker et al. (2024) construct models that link individual‐level trade‐offs in energy allocation under environmental change to population‐level life‐history strategies. A key finding in their study is that short‐lived species are not more sensitive to environmental change—unlike results of previous studies. This study represents a new generation of work that underscores the complexity of predicting population responses to environmental shifts and suggests a need for a broader understanding of individual‐level mechanisms. The results of Rademaker et al. (2024) encourage further mechanistic life‐history analyses across a wider range of species and populations to validate the exciting findings and explore their implications across diverse ecological contexts.
... The environmental relevance of the derived economics space was further tested by correlations with fundamental niche dimensions. In this study we tested whether (i) the primary fungal economics spectrum will reflect successional patterns observed in other organism groups, i.e., a slow-fast spectrum 18,48 , (ii) fast growth strategies will be supported by efficient hyphal strategies and rapid asexual sporulation and (iii) the main axes of the fungal economics space will relate to stress tolerance and be a good predictor for fundamental niche spaces of fungal isolates. Although our trait measurements come from artificial lab conditions (experiments were conducted in petri dishes), we believe that they represent a meaningful first step to infer the resource allocation strategies of saprobic soil fungi. ...
... However, we here studied stress tolerance defined as the ability to maintain growth under sublethal conditions/moderate stress. Longevity and survival of hyphae are likely captured by the slow/dense side of the spectrum-if fungi follow the universal pattern found in other organism groups that slow growth correlates with longevity 48,60 . Indeed, high melanin contents (costly hyphae, Fig. 3, S1) on the dense side of the gradient support this hypothesis: Melanin is a complex biomolecule relevant for survival in extreme habitats 61 . ...
Trait-based frameworks are promising tools to understand the functional consequences of community shifts in response to environmental change. The applicability of these tools to soil microbes is limited by a lack of functional trait data and a focus on categorical traits. To address this gap for an important group of soil microorganisms, we identify trade-offs underlying a fungal economics spectrum based on a large trait collection in 28 saprobic fungal isolates, derived from a common grassland soil and grown in culture plates. In this dataset, ecologically relevant trait variation is best captured by a three-dimensional fungal economics space. The primary explanatory axis represents a dense-fast continuum, resembling dominant life-history trade-offs in other taxa. A second significant axis reflects mycelial flexibility, and a third one carbon acquisition traits. All three axes correlate with traits involved in soil carbon cycling. Since stress tolerance and fundamental niche gradients are primarily related to the dense-fast continuum, traits of the 2nd (carbon-use efficiency) and especially the 3rd (decomposition) orthogonal axes are independent of tested environmental stressors. These findings suggest a fungal economics space which can now be tested at broader scales.
... For example, high versus low mortality induces short versus long expected lifespan. Life history traits can generally be separated into traits relating to the pace of life (lifespan, age of maturity and fast vs slow growth), and those that relate to reproductive investment (degree of iteroparity and clutch size) (Healy et al., 2019;Salguero-Gómez, Jones, Jongejans, et al., 2016). Because demographic rates impact both life history traits and luck, we would expect the role of luck in a population to be strongly related to the population's life history traits. ...
Chance pervades life. In turn, life histories are described by probabilities (e.g. survival and breeding) and averages across individuals (e.g. mean growth rate and age at maturity). In this study, we explored patterns of luck in lifetime outcomes by analysing structured population models for a wide array of plant and animal species. We calculated four response variables: variance and skewness in both lifespan and lifetime reproductive output (LRO), and partitioned them into contributions from different forms of luck. We examined relationships among response variables and a variety of life history traits. We found that variance in lifespan and variance in LRO were positively correlated across taxa, but that variance and skewness were negatively correlated for both lifespan and LRO. The most important life history trait was longevity, which shaped variance and skew in LRO through its effects on variance in lifespan. We found that luck in survival, growth, and fecundity all contributed to variance in LRO, but skew in LRO was overwhelmingly due to survival luck. Rapidly growing populations have larger variances in LRO and lifespan than shrinking populations. Our results indicate that luck‐induced genetic drift may be most severe in recovering populations of species with long mature lifespan and high iteroparity.
... In particular, one genetic region, a 55-Mb double-inversion on chromosome Omy05, features ancestral (A) and rearranged (R) variations that have been repeatedly associated with multiple traits, including egg and early juvenile development (Miller et al., 2012;Nichols et al., 2008;Sundin et al., 2005), juvenile growth (Rundio et al., 2021), age at spawning (Beulke et al., 2023), and sex-specific resident and anadromous migratory strategies (Arostegui et al., 2019;Pearse et al., 2014Pearse et al., , 2019. Because of this association with multiple life history traits and population specific differences, the Omy05 inversion complex (hereafter "Omy05"), appears to influence the fast-slow development continuum, consistent with the important role of "pace of life" in animal life history development, age-specific mortality, and reproduction (Healy et al., 2019). Thus, comparisons of different genetic lineages inhabiting the same environment can help to elucidate the relative effects of adaptive genetic variation and environmental factors on the expression of life history traits. ...
... Together, these patterns suggest that the phenotypic effects of Omy05 variation lead to genotype-specific disassortative mating, growth, or survival, independent of genetic lineage, supporting its role in the developmental "pace of life" (Healy et al., 2019). However, the specific mechanisms driving this selection remain unclear. ...
Populations composed of individuals descended from multiple distinct genetic lineages often feature significant differences in phenotypic frequencies. We considered hatchery production of steelhead, the migratory anadromous form of the salmonid species Oncorhynchus mykiss, and investigated how differences among genetic lineages and environmental variation impacted life history traits. We genotyped 23,670 steelhead returning to the four California Central Valley hatcheries over 9 years from 2011 to 2019, confidently assigning parentage to 13,576 individuals to determine age and date of spawning and rates of iteroparity and repeat spawning within each year. We found steelhead from different genetic lineages showed significant differences in adult life history traits despite inhabiting similar environments. Differences between coastal and Central Valley steelhead lineages contributed to significant differences in age at return, timing of spawning, and rates of iteroparity among programs. In addition, adaptive genomic variation associated with life history development in this species varied among hatchery programs and was associated with the age of steelhead spawners only in the coastal lineage population. Environmental variation likely contributed to variations in phenotypic patterns observed over time, as our study period spanned both a marine heatwave and a serious drought in California. Our results highlight evidence of a strong genetic component underlying known phenotypic differences in life history traits between two steelhead lineages.
... The more primitive a species, the easier to maintain the longevity traits of the taxa preceding this species on the evolutionary tree. It was suggested [10] that aging is slowed down by asexual reproduction [16], modularity, absence of germ-soma differentiation [14,16], absence of predation pressure, shelter security [17], ability for regeneration, and presence of a small number of cell types [12]. ...
... Life-history strategy (LHS) represents how species reconcile the fundamental challenges of evolution-survival, growth and reproduction (Stearns, 1992). Life history can be broadly described by the shape and pace of life with regard to ageing (Baudisch, 2011;Healy et al., 2019), and fertility (Baudisch & Stott, 2019;Healy et al., 2019). ...
... Life-history strategy (LHS) represents how species reconcile the fundamental challenges of evolution-survival, growth and reproduction (Stearns, 1992). Life history can be broadly described by the shape and pace of life with regard to ageing (Baudisch, 2011;Healy et al., 2019), and fertility (Baudisch & Stott, 2019;Healy et al., 2019). ...
Aim
Human pressure in the oceans is pervasive and affects marine life. Understanding species' differing responses to human pressure, and how human pressure compares to other environmental variables in shaping marine communities is needed to facilitate the sustainable management of the seas. Despite theory and empirical evidence that fishing pressure affects marine life‐history strategies, several recent large‐scale studies have not shown strong relationships between fishing pressure and community composition. We aim to reconcile theory with data and explain these variable findings, testing the hypothesis that the signal of the effect of fishing pressure on marine communities depends on the scale at which the community is defined.
Location
North East Atlantic.
Time Period
2009 to 2021.
Major Taxa Studied
Marine vertebrates (Teleostei, Elasmobranchii, Petromyzonti, Holocephali).
Methods
We collate extensive scientific marine biodiversity surveys, published life‐history traits and high‐resolution annual fishing pressure data. Using frequentist Generalized Linear Mixed Models, we assess whether community mean weighted life‐history traits correlate with fishing pressure, sea surface temperature and depth and whether the strength of these relationships are scale dependant.
Results
We show fish community life‐history strategy correlates with fishing pressure, and the relative importance of fishing pressure compared to environmental variables increases with the scale at which a community is defined.
Main Conclusions
We suggest this scale dependence relates to the spatial extent over which covariates vary, and how fish movement moderates communities' experience of this variability. Our findings highlight the importance of explicit consideration of scale in ecological research, supporting the idea that studying systems at ecologically relevant scales is necessary to detect and appropriately interpret the effects of global change.
