Within-Brood Competition and the Optimal Partitioning of Parental Investment

In this article, we introduce a simple within-brood competitive growth model that maximizes parental fitness in unpredictable food conditions, in species that exhibit parental care, progressive provisioning, and an initial brood overproduction. We argue that competition between siblings may provide a proximate mechanism for parents to adjust the number of surviving offspring, or the social organization of the group in social species, to food conditions. <p> <p> <p> To appear in: American Naturalist 152 (1998): 419--427.