BIOL 1602 Lecture Notes - Life Time Fitness, Ovipositor
Document Summary
Lack"s hypothesis predicts that parents will attempt to rear that number of young that maximizes the number of surviving offspring. Data indicate that parents often rear fewer offspring. Efforts to identify which of lack"s assumptions are violated have led to the discovery of additional trade-offs and improved estimates of lifetime fitness. Lack"s hypothesis is a useful null model for other organisms in addition to birds. Soon after she has laid one clutch, a female wasp may begin looking for another host to parasitize. The appropriate measure of a wasp"s fitness with regard to clutch size may not be the discrete fitness she gains from a single clutch. Instead, it may be the rate at which her fitness rises as she searches for hosts and lays eggs in them. In summary: assuming only that there is a trade-off between the number of offspring in a clutch and the survivial of individual offspring.
