Biodiversity Research Seminar Series (BRS)
BRS Hanna Kokko: Life history theory: sometimes intuitive, sometimes not
January 17, 2024, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Zoom webinar recording:
Passcode: &MN^P8.n
host: Rachel Germain lab
Title: Life history theory: sometimes intuitive, sometimes not
Abstract: If lifespans are often cut short - in other words, if an organism lives in a hazardous environment, either for biotic or abiotic reasons - one might expect the optimal life history scheduling to change. Theoretical work seems to sometimes provide strong support for this idea and sometimes not, and this is somewhat mysterious: maths cannot be wrong (unless someone has computed something wrong), so why is there so much disagreement out there? Theoreticians working on this end up talking a lot about population regulation and density dependence - which at first sight seem to be phenomena that are only distantly related to fast and slow life histories. In my talk I will attempt to clarify why this connection plays such a crucial role in deriving predictions. I will also briefly mention a related result from ontogenetic changes in social networks.