Timing of reproduction in consumer-resource interactions

Timing of reproduction plays an important role in consumer-resource interactions, in particular when the development of the individuals is resource-dependent and when the resource productivity is changing over time. Despite its ubiquity in many species, seasonal reproduction is only to a limited extent represented in current ecological theory, in particular in models that include ontogenetic development. This thesis presents results on the analysis of consumer-resource models with seasonal reproduction, not only population dynamics but also evolutionary dynamics are studied. The robustness of the results has been shown by studying model variants with altered consumer reproduction strategies and/or different resource growth patterns, as well as by investigating the mechanisms at the individual level. Although seasonal reproduction does not qualitatively affect some of the dynamical predictions in the existing theory, this thesis reports new dynamics that will only be observed in models with seasonal reproduction. This thesis furthermore extends the theory to the evolutionary time scales by examining the evolution of timing of reproduction. The results show that seasonal reproduction can only be advantageous if the seasonality in the resource growth is significant.