Tune in for the live stream on YouTube or Twitter.
Abstract: Complex life cycles are characteristic for the majority of species in the animal kingdom. One prominent consequence of a complex life cycle is that as juveniles individuals interact with a different ecological environment than as adults, which gives rise to a potential intergenerational conflict between parents and their offspring. Selection favours adults to increase reproduction as much as possible, but this leads to more intense competition among their offspring. Vice versa, when juveniles do well and manage to mature in large numbers, competition among adults is intensified. This intergenerational tension influences the dynamics of populations with implications for ecosystem functioning, such as the extent to which a system yields harvestable biomass, as well as conservation of species. I will in this lecture provide examples to show how such intergenerational conflicts lead to complex dynamics on both ecological and evolutionary time scales.
Speaker
André de RoosExternal Professor