Optimizing time and resource allocation trade-offs for investment into morphological and behavioral defense

Abstract

Prey organisms are confronted with time and resource allocation trade-offs. Time allocation trade-offs partition time, for example, between foraging effort to acquire resources and behavioral defense. Resource allocation trade-offs partition the acquired resources between multiple traits, such as growth or morphological defense. We develop a mathematical model for prey organisms that comprise time and resource allocation trade-offs for multiple defense traits. Fitness is determined by growth and survival during ontogeny. We determine optimal defense strategies for environments that differ in their resource abundance, predation risk, and defense effectiveness. We compare the results with results of simplified models where single defense traits are optimized. Our results indicate that selection acts in favor of integrated traits. The selective advantage of expressing multiple defense traits is most pronounced at intermediate environmental conditions. Optimizing single traits generally leads to a more pronounced response of the defense traits, which implies that studying single traits leads to an overestimation of their response to predation. Behavioral defense and morphological defense compensate for and augment each other depending on predator densities and the effectiveness of the defense mechanisms. In the presence of time constraints, the model shows peak investment into morphological and behavioral defense at intermediate resource levels.