Key Concepts in Ecology: Life histories

This blog post on ‘Life histories’ is part of the BES ‘Key Concepts in Ecology’ series, designed to help ecologists in learning the key topics in ecology! Take a look at the full blog series for a list of key topics you might typically find in an ecology textbook, each providing a quick introduction to the topic, and a list of suggested papers for students to refer to.

Life history traits are the characteristics that influence an organism’s reproductive success and survival throughout its life cycle. For example, studying population demography (the vital statistics of populations and how they change over time) can tell you about population growth and decline in response to global change drivers (Paniw et al. 2021) or in projecting the persistence of threatened populations (Colchero et al. 2021).

There are also tradeoffs between life history traits; tradeoffs involve allocating limited resources to different life history traits or function, such that allocation to one trait or function may come at the expense of another. For example, tradeoffs between growth and mortality are common in many wild populations (Dhellemmes et al. 2020), and the environment an organism experiences can shape tradeoffs (Berger et al. 2021).

Reproductive life history traits are the set of traits that describe an organism’s reproductive strategy and influence its reproductive success. As you know, some organisms invest heavily in a few offspring, while others produce numerous offspring with lower parental investment. For many organisms, including plants, reproduction declines with age (Roach and Smith 2020). In some species, like the fish the peacock blenny, males can have very different reproductive strategies. Some large males might protect nests, while other smaller males are sneaker males (Fagundes et al. 2015).

Introduction written by Nate Sanders (Executive Editor, Journal of Animal Ecology). Reading list curated by the BES journal Editors.