Contenu
"Life history traits are defined as those related to the timing and magnitude of major events in the life of an organism (e.g., birth, maturation, reproduction, and death). Life history theory aims at explaining the huge variation in these trait values and their combinations that we see in nature. Hence, life history strategies are at the heart of evolutionary ecology, illuminating how organisms are structured and how they allocate resources, behave, and evolve, in response to different environmental pressures. Throughout the years, the study of life history evolution has experienced some major advances. First, while classical life history theory relied on optimization approaches and had some major empirical successes, more advanced approaches, involving frequency- and density-dependence, explicit population dynamics, and evolutionary game theory, have further promoted our understanding in the field. Second, while classical theory often emerged from observations of life history patterns in a specific group of animals (e.g., clutch size in birds), later work extended and further developed these principles to the study of a variety of organisms including different groups of vertebrates, invertebrates (in particular, arthropods), plants, fungi, and even bacteria. At the same time, concepts from life history evolution were used to promote our understanding of human evolutionary ecology. Third, while classical life history theory often focused on a few basic life history traits, most commonly including lifespan, growth, and investment in reproduction, later works extended our view to consider additional traits such as dispersal, mating systems, sociality, etc., either as life history traits on their own merit or in the context of their interaction with major life history traits (e.g., investment in reproduction and longevity). Fourth, while classical life history theory often addressed the evolution of each organism independently, later advances extended this approach to consider life history evolution also in the context of inter-specific and even community level co-evolutionary interactions. Fifth, with the advance in molecular, genetic, and physiological methods, we can now better understand the underlying proximate mechanisms of life history patterns. Sixth, while theory often focusses on evolutionary responses to environmental conditions, we now have accumulating evidence that evolutionary processes may occur at short enough time scale to allow eco-evolutionary feedback loops."--