Intra- and Interspecific Relationships of Reproductive Investment to Body Weight in Insects

Recently, Reiss proposed an allometric model to account for why large species invest relatively less in their offspring, which he subsequently extended to intraspecific relationships. Although Reiss used data on aphids among other groups to verify his model's predictions, aphids actually do not conform to this hypothesis. Here we propose an explanation of this discrepancy based on a model, which incorporates the optimal partitioning of energy, gained from assimilation (a), between soma and gonads, the optimal time of maturation and constraints on the gonadal growth rate (R) and the size of soma at birth (s 0 )