Abstract
Abstract Aquatic and terrestrial environments display stark differences in key environmental factors and phylogenetic composition but their consequences for the evolution of species' life‐history strategies remain poorly understood. Here, we examine whether and how life‐history strategies vary between terrestrial and aquatic species. We use demographic information for 685 terrestrial and 122 aquatic animal and plant species to estimate key life‐history traits. We then use phylogenetically corrected least squares regression to explore potential differences in trade‐offs between life‐history traits between both environments. We contrast life‐history strategies of aquatic versus terrestrial species in a principal component analysis while accounting for body dimensions and phylogenetic relationships. Our results show that the same trade‐offs structure terrestrial and aquatic life histories, resulting in two dominant axes of variation that describe species' pace of life and reproductive strategies. Terrestrial plants display a large diversity of strategies, including the longest‐lived species in this study. Aquatic animals exhibit higher reproductive frequency than terrestrial animals. When correcting for body size, mobile and sessile terrestrial organisms show slower paces of life than aquatic ones. Aquatic and terrestrial species are ruled by the same life‐history trade‐offs, but have evolved different strategies, likely due to distinct environmental selective pressures. Such contrasting life‐history strategies have important consequences for the conservation and management of aquatic and terrestrial species. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
Highlights
The rich diversity of life-history strategies world-wide stems from three fundamental demographic building blocks: survival, development and reproduction (Stearns, 1992)
Our results show that life-history strategies of terrestrial and aquatic organisms are organized along the same dominant axes of variation and are constrained by the same trade-offs, regardless of the environment
The aquatic species we have examined here have not evolved the high longevities attained by some of the terrestrial species
Summary
The rich diversity of life-history strategies world-wide stems from three fundamental demographic building blocks: survival, development and reproduction (Stearns, 1992). Given the limitations in available energy and physiological constraints, compromises among survival, development and reproduction are inescapable for any organism, whether aquatic or terrestrial (Stearns, 1992) Such constraints should result in a finite set of viable life-history strategies. We estimate key life-history traits that reflect various moments of population turnover, as well as investments in survival, development and reproduction of each species To test these hypotheses, we first determine whether correlations between life-history traits differ across environments as a way to examine whether trade-offs diverge between terrestrial versus aquatic species. Given the scarcity of comparative studies and the lack of demographic information for many aquatic species, elucidating these questions is a key step towards understanding the evolution of life histories across environments
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