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 …

Maternal fitness should be maximized by the optimal division of reproductive investment
between offspring number and offspring quality. While evidence for this is abundant in many …

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 …

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

A central paradigm in life‐history theory is the trade‐off between offspring number and
quality. Several studies have investigated this trade‐off in humans, but data are …

According to life-history theory, investment in reproduction is associated with costs, which
should appear as decreased survival to the next reproduction or lower future reproductive …

Length of maternal care, ie the interval between successfully raised litters, is the most
important factor explaining the variation in reproductive rate among brown-bear (Ursus …

Individuals of numerous rodent species engage in group living, in which they share an area
of activity, a nest (or den), and interact more frequently with group members than with …

Reproductive and early life‐history traits can be considered aspects of either offspring or
maternal phenotype, and their evolution will therefore depend on selection operating …

Food limitation has been suggested as one of the most important factors affecting life history
evolution in terrestrial vertebrates. However, this inference is based mainly on evidence from …