Reproductive Strategies as Adaptations to Life in Temporally Heterogeneous Environments

This article is an investigation of the ways in which organisms respond to temporal variance in their environments by pattern. Temporal variance refers specifically to variation in those aspects of environment that more or less directly affect the probabilities of survival of parents and/or their offspring, including predation, food quality and quantity, and aspects of weather. A large body of theory pertaining to reproductive exists, which is reviewed here. However, because many recent papers on attributes of selected species contain reviews of pertinent theory, I intend to direct the major part of my efforts toward investigating the extent to which theoretical conclusions explain natural variation in pattern and to investigating the role of mathematically defined strategy in pattern. Theoretical treatments devised to explain natural variation in pattern often depend, sometimes with reparameterization, on analysis of means of maximizing fitness, using the basic equation: