Authors
Joan Maspons Ventura
Publication date
2022/4/22
Institution
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Description
In nature, we find an extraordinary diversity of life history strategies, the different ways in which species optimize their limited resources in different components of the fitness, such as reproduction, development or survival. In a changing world like ours, even more in a context of human-induced rapid environmental change, it is vital to understand how species can adapt to the new conditions taking into account the constraints and trade-offs between different traits. The framework of the life history theory allows us to view the evolution of species traits in an integrated way as a function of the selection pressures from the environment. In the case of animals, an alternative mechanism to deal with changes is through the plasticity of behaviour. Although behavioural and life history responses have traditionally been analysed separately, recent evidence suggest that they could be linked in what we call peace of life syndromes. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to understanding how species respond to changes and what is the role of the life histories and behaviour. In the first chapter, I describe the main axes of variation of life history in birds, emphasising the demographic effects of the fast-slow axis and describing other less studied axes such as the iteroparity or the relative egg size (Chapter 2). Then, I explore the effects and the interactions between life history and behaviour in a context of environmental change using a stochastic individual based model, showing that the benefits of learning are contingent on life history (Chapter 3}). Finally, I describe the existence of interactions between life history and behaviour in facilitating the response to human …