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Behavioral Ecology Vol. 14 No. 3: 447-450
© 2003 International Society for Behavioral Ecology
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Odds-playing and the timing of sex change in uncertain environments: you bet your wrasse
Center for Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, T.H. Morgan School of Biological Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506–0225, USA
Address correspondence to L. Rogers, who is now at the Department of Biology, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 97219, USA. E-mail: lrogers@lclark.edu.
Received 22 June 2001; revised 27 August 2002; accepted 21 September 2002.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Stochastic events contribute to the distribution of environments experienced by individuals and populations. Such distributions have the interesting property that although the effect random events will have on the phenotype of a given individual is uncertain, at larger sample sizes (e.g., at the level of the population) these effects become approximately deterministic and may be easily predicted. For example, the date on which an ephemeral pond will dry out (a deciding occurrence in the life of a developing tadpole), although uncertain, is predicted by some probability density distribution describing the behavior of ponds over space and time.
In this paper I develop a simple model for considering the effect of environmental uncertainty on the optimal timing of life-history transitions, focusing primarily on the timing of sex change. Specifically, I use this fact to explain the phenomenon of "early sex change" on the basis of deterministic factors alone.
The principal model
The probabilistic size-advantage model
Conclusions
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