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Dimensionless Invariants For The Optimal Size (Age) Of Sex Change, Eric Charnov, Unnur Skúladóttir

Biology Faculty & Staff Publications

Optimization models have been widely and successfully used in evolutionary ecology to predict the attributes of organisms; perhaps the greatest quantitative success is in the area of sex allocation (sex ratio, sperm versus eggs for hermaphrodites, time as a male [female] for a sex changer), where the fact of having only one mother and one father makes Darwinian fitness a simple product of gain-via-male times gain-via-female. Previous work on sex change used the maximization of this male—female product to successfully predict the direction and age (size) for sex change, and that age has been shown to imply a breeding sex …