Not putting all their eggs in one basket: bet-hedging despite extraordinary annual reproductive output of desert tortoises

All Your Eggs in One Basket: Mechanisms of Xenobiotic Induced Female Reproductive Senescence

Bet hedging in desert winter annual plants: optimal germination strategies in a variable environment.

In bet hedging, organisms sacrifice short-term success to reduce the long-term variance in success. Delayed germination is the classic example of bet hedging, in which a fraction of seeds remain dormant as a hedge against the risk of complete reproductive failure. Here, we investigate the adaptive nature of delayed germination as a bet hedging strategy using long-term demographic data on Sonora...

Bet hedging in a guild of desert annuals.

Evolutionary bet hedging encapsulates the counterintuitive idea that organisms evolve traits that reduce short-term reproductive success in favor of longer-term risk reduction. It has been widely investigated theoretically, and many putative examples have been cited including practical ones such as the dormancy involved in microbe and weed persistence. However, long-term data on demographic var...

A direct assay of female choice in cichlids: all the eggs in one basket

A novel testing apparatus is presented which affords the researcher maximum control over the testing environment, but allows for the scoring of actual spawning events. Female Metriaclima zebra and Metriaclima benetos chose the appropriate conspecific mate in every mating trial performed. This apparatus provides support for a critical assumption of many cichlid speciation models: that female cic...

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket? Diversification and Specialization in Lending

Should lenders diversify, as suggested by the financial intermediation literature, or specialize, as suggested by the corporate finance literature? I model a financial institution’s (“bank’s”) choice between these two strategies in a setting where bank failure is costly and loan monitoring adds value. All else equal, diversification across loan sectors helps most when loans have moderate exposu...