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Variation in life history (LH) traits along the fast-slow continuum (referred to as pace of life, POL) is thought to result from a trade-off between investments in current versus future reproduction. Originally developed for understanding variation in LH strategies at the among-population level, the POL theory has more recently been applied towards understanding variation in LH traits at the within-population level, and further extended to address the covariance of LH traits with additional behavioural and/or physiological traits, referred to as pace-of-life syndromes (POLS). The article by Réale et al. (Philos T Roy Soc B 365:4051–4063, 2010), which synthesized several earlier reviews and opinions on among-individual covariation between LH, behavioural, and physiological traits, and subsequent research testing POLS in a variety of species, have collectively been cited several hundreds of times—a trend that …