Print PageLife history characters like age at maturity, number of offspring, size of offspring, and body growth rate are highly correlated with survival rate. Promislow and Harvey in 1990 proposed the fast-slow continuum hypothesis, which suggests that populations with low adult survival will exhibit “fast” life history traits (high fecundity, small size at birth, fast body growth rates, and small size at maturity), whereas populations with high adult survival will exhibit “slow” life history traits (low fecundity, large size at birth, slow body growth rates, and large size at maturity). We conducted mark-recapture experiments in eight populations of the lizard Sceloporus grammicus in the Mexican states of Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Queretaro. We estimated survival rates through multi-state analyses implemented in the program MARK. We conducted simple correlations and linear regressions in R to test for possible associations between life history characters and survival rates.
Results/Conclusions
In populations with low adult survival, we found that high fecundity, small sizes at birth, and fast body growth rates are favored, whereas in populations with high adult survival, low fecundity, large sizes at birth and slow body growth rates are favored. These observations agree with the predictions of the fast-slow continuum hypothesis and support it at the intra-specific level.
