Abstract
All living creatures evolve in variable environments, and natural selection yields various responses to this variability. These responses include phenotypic plasticity, genetic polymorphisms, and bet hedging. If the future environment cannot be predicted from current cues, natural selection may favor bet hedging. For bet hedging to be favored, it must yield a higher geometric mean fitness and it does this by lowering temporal variation in fitness at the expense of arithmetic mean fitness. Bet hedging has been divided into two types: conservative, where a single phenotype avoids risks, and diversified, where a variety of phenotypes are expressed by a single genotype. Bet hedging can occur over time, space, or both, and three situations for bet hedging can be usefully distinguished: temporal, metapopulation, and within-generation. These categories are extremes of gradients determined by the variance in fitness among individuals and the correlations in fitness among individuals of a given genotype. Here I summarize the theory behind bet hedging, discuss the kinds of evidence to test for bet hedging, and then review evidence for bet hedging in diapause duration, migration polyphenism, spatial distribution of oviposition, polyandry, and other traits.
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