Despite tremendous progress in recent years, our understanding of the evolution of ageing
is still incomplete. A dominant paradigm maintains that ageing evolves due to the competing …

In most social mammals, some females disperse from their natal group while others remain
and breed there throughout their lives but, in a few, females typically disperse after …

For three years, we manipulated litter size by adding or subtracting pups in eight wild
populations of the bank vole, Clethrionomys glareolus, to examine reproductive costs and …

Life history theory has become a prominent framework in the evolutionary social sciences,
and the concept of trade-offs, the cornerstone of life history theory in studies on non-human …

Wild European rabbits of both sexes have separate linear rank orders, which are
established and maintained by intensive fights. This paper presents data from a 14-year …

Optimality theories of ageing predict that the balance between reproductive effort and
somatic maintenance determines the rate of ageing. Laboratory studies find that increased …

1. Although spacing behaviour in small mammals has been studied extensively, the ultimate
function of territoriality in females is frequently under debate. Furthermore, almost no data …

Life‐history theory predicts that organisms will provide an optimal level of parental
investment for offspring survival balanced against the effects on their own survival and future …

Oxidative damage is predicted to be a mediator of trade-offs between current reproduction
and future reproduction or survival, but most studies fail to support such predictions. We …

Food availability, energetic ceilings, and life‐history trade‐offs have been proposed as
potential determinants of offspring number in many animals. We investigated the role of …