R-selection: On one extreme are the species that are highly r-selected. Now imagine that you're an animal faced with the following choice: given limited resources, should you put them all into producing one or a few offspring, and protect them with great ferocity, or should you put a small amount of effort into a much larger number of offspring, and let them each take their chances? Should you measure out your reproductive effort over many seasons, or save it all up for a one-time mating frenzy as soon as you're able? These trade-offs relate to the r/K selection theory of life history strategies.Ī mouse produces a large litter. One way is to become the dominant animal in a pack, and to monopolize mating opportunities, but another way is to be submissive and sneaky, mating with others when the dominant animal is not around to stop you. As you might imagine, there are many ways to be reproductively successful. In the relay race of evolution, getting as many copies of your genes into the next generation as possible is the only goal. In evolutionary terms, it is of no consequence if an organism is a fine, fully mature, physical specimen, or the dominant member of the herd, or even that an individual produces a lot of young but none of them survive. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Introduction: An organism's Darwinian fitness is calculated as the number of offspring it leaves behind that, themselves, survive to reproduce. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.

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