How to time growth and reproduction during the vegetative season: an evolutionary choice for indeterminate growers in seasonal environments.

Indeterminate growers such as plants, mollusks, fish, amphibians, and reptiles are highly diversified with respect to the seasonal timing of growth and reproduction. Current life-history theory does not offer a consistent view on the origin of this diversity. We use dynamic optimization to examine resource allocation in seasonal environments, considering that offspring produced at different times of the season have unequal future prospects. Reduction of these prospects during the season produced indeterminate growers that grew mostly after maturation, achieving large final body sizes. It also changed the optimal timing of growth and reproduction during a season, from grow-first-reproduce-later, as usually predicted by life-history theory, to the reproduce-first-grow-later tactic; other tactics were produced by the interactive effects of winter survival and unequal offspring prospects. The results suggest that devaluation of offspring production provides conditions for the evolution of capital breeding, even in fully predictable seasonal environments. Thus, the unequal fate of newborns from different parts of a season may explain the origin of diversity of reproductive phenologies, growth patterns, and capital breeding in nature.