STAT 2230 Lecture Notes - Parasitoid, Life Time Fitness, Ovipositor
Document Summary
The more offspring a parent (or pair of parents) attempts to raise at once, the less time and energy the parent can devote to caring for each one. Selection will favour the clutch size that produces the most surviving offspring. Any individual offspring will survive decreases with increasing clutch size. The ability of the parents to feed any individual offspring declines as the number of offspring increases. In an experiment, the mean clutch size was 8. 53: the average number of surviving offspring from clutches of each size was also determined. This number was highest for clutches of 12 eggs. When researchers added 3 eggs to each of a large number of clutches, the most productive clutch size was still 12. In other words, birds that produced smaller clutches apparently could have increased their reproductive success for the year by laying 12 eggs.