GLOSSARY
- Actuarial (or reproductive ) senescence : Decreases in survival (or reproduction) with age after maturity.
- Altricial vs. precocial : born helpless and requiring significant parental care vs. born in an advanced state and able to feed itself and move independently almost immediately.
- Bauplan : the generalised structural body plan that characterises a group of organisms and especially a major taxon.
- Generation time : mean age of reproduction in a population. Other definitions exist, such as the average time between two consecutive generations.
- Fast-slow continuum : pattern of species’ life history strategies structured along two extremes: “fast” species develop fast, reproduce much, and die young, whereas “slow” species develop slowly, reproduce little, and live a long life. In its original inception, Stearns referred to it as ‘slow-fast’ [36], but here we revert it as this is currently a more widely used term.
- Life expectancy : the average period that an organism may expect to live in a population.
- Life history trait : key moments along the life cycle of an organism related to its investment on survival, development, and/or reproduction. Examples include generation time, age at maturity, longevity, etc .
- Life history strategy : the age- and/or stage-specific patterns and timings of events that make up an organism’s life cycle. Life history strategies are defined by the combination of life history traits (e.g., long-lived semelparous).
- Lifetime reproductive output : total number of offspring produced over the lifetime of an individual.
- Retrogression : the ability to regress to a smaller, younger, or less developed stage with time.
- Semelparity vs. iteroparity : reproductive schedule whereby a single (vs. multiple) reproductive event(s) occurs during the lifecycle of an organism. In fatal semelparity, death occurs right after reproduction.
- Vital rate : Key demographic process that shapes the dynamics of a population. At minimum, these rates include survival, development (in stage-based models), and reproduction, but can also include dispersal, dormancy, etc .