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Evolutionary Balancing of Fitness‐Limiting Factors

Debates concerning the roles of different factors that may limit an organism’s reproductive success pervade evolutionary ecology. We suggest that a broad class of limiting‐factors problems involving essential resources or essential components of reproductive effort can be analyzed with an evolutionary application of Liebig’s law of the minimum. We explore life‐history evolution using the metaphor of an organism that must harvest two essential resources (resources 1 and 2) from a stochastically varying environment. Our models make three predictions. First, organisms should overinvest, relative to the deterministic case, in harvesting the resource whose per‐offspring harvest cost is smaller. Second, at the optimum, organisms balance multiple fitness‐limiting factors rather than being consistently limited by one factor. Third, the optimal investment in harvesting a resource is directly linked to the probability that the organism’s fitness will be limited by that resource. Under temporal variation, the optimal proportional investment in harvesting resource 1 is equal to the probability that resource 1 will limit fitness. Our results help to explain why the responses of populations to environmental perturbations are hard to predict: as an organism transitions between different limiting factors, its responses to perturbations of those factors will likewise change.