Individual stochasticity in the life history strategies of animals and plants

The life histories of organisms are expressed as rates of development, reproduction, and survival. However, individuals may experience differential outcomes for the same set of rates. Such individual stochasticity generates variance around familiar mean measures of life history traits, such as life expectancy and the reproductive number R-0. By writing life cycles as Markov chains, we calculate variance and other indices of variability for longevity, lifetime reproductive output (LRO), age at offspring production, and age at maturity for 83 animal and 332 plant populations from the Comadre and Compadre matrix databases. We find that the magnitude within and variability between populations in variance indices in LRO, especially, are surprisingly high. We furthermore use principal components analysis to assess how the inclusion of variance indices of different demographic outcomes affects life history constraints. We find that these indices, to a similar or greater degree than the mean, explain the variation in life history strategies among plants and animals.