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 .