Are some species more sensitive to environmental change than others? It may all depend on the context

Abstract

Research Highlight: Rademaker, M., van Leeuwen, A., & Smallegange, I. M. (2024). Why we cannot always expect life history strategies to directly inform on sensitivity to environmental change. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.14050. Ecological studies have long delved into how organisms allocate energy between reproduction and somatic maintenance to maximize fitness. This allocation gives rise to various life‐history strategies, and these strategies have been shown to predict how populations respond to environmental change, allowing us to generalize potential responses to increasing human pressures. Such predictions have, however, been made for a limited set of terrestrial taxa and typically do not explore how individual differences in life‐history responses to environmental change scale to affect population‐level responses. Using novel data on diverse fish species, Rademaker et al. (2024) construct models that link individual‐level trade‐offs in energy allocation under environmental change to population‐level life‐history strategies. A key finding in their study is that short‐lived species are not more sensitive to environmental change—unlike results of previous studies. This study represents a new generation of work that underscores the complexity of predicting population responses to environmental shifts and suggests a need for a broader understanding of individual‐level mechanisms. The results of Rademaker et al. (2024) encourage further mechanistic life‐history analyses across a wider range of species and populations to validate the exciting findings and explore their implications across diverse ecological contexts.