Life history theory is a concept in evolutionary biology that seeks to explain how organisms allocate their resources towards growth, reproduction, and survival over their lifetime. The central idea is that because resources are limited, organisms face trade-offs in how they use those resources, influencing their reproductive strategies and life stages. Key components of life history theory include: 1. **Reproductive Strategies**: Organisms can have different strategies based on their environment and evolutionary pressures.
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Life history theory explains how natural selection shapes the timing and allocation of growth, survival and reproduction. Age at maturity, offspring number and investment per offspring affect lifetime reproductive success, but cannot generally be improved independently because resources and time are limited.
A life-history trade-off is a constraint, rather than simply an observed negative correlation. Individuals acquiring more resources can both reproduce more and survive better, masking an underlying cost of allocation. An experiment that changes reproductive effort while measuring later survival or fecundity addresses the cost more directly than comparing naturally different individuals.