ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Individual life histories: neither slow nor fast, just diverse.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- How toothed whales divide up the world: phylogeny and ecology shape life-history strategies of odontocetes.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Male conspicuous coloration covaries with aggression but not with exploration in the short-lived annual fish Nothobranchius guentheri.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Environmental Variability Shapes Life-History Trade-Offs Within and Between Populations of a Long-Lived Seabird.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Evidence for Environment-Specific Pace-of-Life Syndromes.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Controlling for life-history traits in vertebrates reveals that effective population size does not affect mutation rate or genome size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Interaction Between Age and Individual Heterogeneity Shapes Breeding Probability in a Long-Lived Marine Ectotherm.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Comparative life-cycle analyses reveal interacting climatic and biotic drivers of population responses to climate change.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Foraging ants as liquid brains: Movement heterogeneity shapes collective efficiency.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Body size and condition, not allochrony, affect temporal reproductive patterns in a prolonged breeding anuran.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Metamorphosis Reverses the Behavioral Phenotype inEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Sex affects the network of covariances between cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits in guppies.iScience · 2025Article
- The end of long-term ecological data?PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Age-dependent decline in sperm quality and function in a naturally short-lived vertebrate.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Soil and plant communities co-regulating plant biomass allocation patterns along a saline-alkali gradient, case study ofFrontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Eels' individual migratory behavior stems from a complex syndrome involving cognition, behavior, physiology, and life history.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Individual life histories: neither slow nor fast, just diverse.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Silver spoons, reproduction, and growth catch-up in eastern Grey kangaroos.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Life History Strategies of Male Criminal Offenders: Verifying Traditional Life History Patterns.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
25 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The slow-fast continuum is a commonly used framework to describe variation in life-history strategies across species. Individual life histories have also been assumed to follow a similar pattern, especially in the pace-of-life syndrome literature. However, whether a slow-fast continuum commonly explains life-history variation among individuals within a population remains unclear. Here, we formally tested for the presence of a slow-fast continuum of life histories both within populations and across species using detailed long-term individual-based demographic data for 17 bird and mammal species with markedly different life histories. We estimated adult lifespan, age at first reproduction, annual breeding frequency, and annual fecundity, and identified the main axes of life-history variation using principal component analyses. Across species, we retrieved the slow-fast continuum as the main axis of life-history variation. However, within populations, the patterns of individual life-history variation did not align with a slow-fast continuum in any species. Thus, a continuum ranking individuals from slow to fast living is unlikely to shape individual differences in life histories within populations. Rather, individual life-history variation is likely idiosyncratic across species, potentially because of processes such as stochasticity, density dependence, and individual differences in resource acquisition that affect species differently and generate non-generalizable patterns across species.
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