Environmental perturbations and transitions between ecological and evolutionary equilibria: an eco-evolutionary feedback framework

I provide a general framework for linking ecology and evolution. I start from the fact that individuals require energy, trace molecules, water, and mates to survive and reproduce, and that phenotypic resource accrual traits determine an individual's ability to detect and acquire these resources. Optimum resource accrual traits, and their values, are determined by the dynamics of resources, aspects of the environment that hinder resource detection and acquisition by imposing risks of mortality and reproductive failure, and the energetic costs of developing and maintaining the traits -part of an individual's energy budget. These budgets also describe how individuals utilize energy by partitioning it into maintenance, development and/or reproduction at each age and size, age and size at sexual maturity, and the size and number of offspring produced at each reproductive event.