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Life history invariants, age at maturity and the ferox trout

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Summary

Data on brown trout in Norway and on Arctic char in Norway, Iceland, Greenland or Canada are used to make three points about life-history invariants. First, invariants constructed from adaptive programmes of development that are conditioned on growth and mortality rates are more complicated than those constructed solely on the basis of dimensional analysis, but are more consistent with the data. Second, if one allows the possibility of escaping a size ceiling (e.g. by switching from planktivory to piscivory) ‘ferox trout’ — brown trout that are exceptionally large and long lived — are predicted with the theory only if mortality is size dependent and the growth rate on food sources with different asymptotic sizes differs. Third, a successful empirical approach for finding life-history invariants can be more fully understood as the result of adaptive programmes of development.

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  1. Section of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, 95616, Davis, CA, USA

    Marc Mangel

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Mangel, M. Life history invariants, age at maturity and the ferox trout. Evol Ecol 10, 249–263 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01237683

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