The community ecology of live long and prosper

摘要

Life-history theory has long predicted that the development time of organisms should be positively associated with body size and, ultimately, fitness. This admittedly oversimplified view assumes that resource quality remains constant through time. Of course, this is not true; the relationship must also be affected by changes in resource quality, especially in seasonally varying environments. In a community context, one could predict that, during periods of rapid environmental change, organisms might not benefit from extended development times. Alternatively, when resource quality remains relatively static, the original life-history predictions should hold. Understanding the seasonal changes in resource quality and determining experimentally the genetic relationships between life-history traits in a community of organisms is a tall order. This is just what Kause etal. [1] deliver in a new paper. This, along with two other new papers bythe birch-herbivore group in Turku, Finland, demonstrates local adaptation of herbivores to the timing of seasonal physiochemical decline in leaf quality and the predicted genetic relationships between development time and body size.