Dispersal, disease and life-history evolution

Virulence evolution and the timing of disease life-history events

Recent research is directed towards testing the idea that parasite virulence evolution is constrained by a tradeoff between parasite transmission and parasiteinduced host mortality (i.e. virulence). Such parasite fitness components are natural analogs of organismal life-history characters, and here I highlight the role that the timing of such disease life-history events can have in virulence ev...

Life history and morphological evolution

Morphological evolution is influenced by a wide variety of processes, at levels that likely range from molecules to communities, or even ecosystems. The relative contributions of these processes and other biological properties to morphological evolution in individual lineages, and their ultimate role in mediating the evolutionary success of these groups, remain fundamental problems in evolution...

The evolution of cooperative breeding in birds: kinship, dispersal and life history.

The evolution of cooperation among animals has posed a major problem for evolutionary biologists, and despite decades of research into avian cooperative breeding systems, many questions about the evolution of their societies remain unresolved. A review of the kin structure of avian societies shows that a large majority live in kin-based groups. This is consistent with the proposed evolutionary ...

Evolution of dispersal and life history interact to drive accelerating spread of an invasive species.

Populations on the edge of an expanding range are subject to unique evolutionary pressures acting on their life-history and dispersal traits. Empirical evidence and theory suggest that traits there can evolve rapidly enough to interact with ecological dynamics, potentially giving rise to accelerating spread. Nevertheless, which of several evolutionary mechanisms drive this interaction between e...

The constant philopater hypothesis : a new life history invariant for dispersal evolution 1 ! 2 !