Meeting Abstract
Inter-individual differences can arise during any stage of an individual’s life and as a result of a variety of different processes. The identity and timing of those processes, however, ultimately dictate the ecological and evolutionary outcomes that they initiate. In recent years, increased ability to identify the causes and consequences of inter-individual differences has better enabled the identification of a number of general processes involved in their creation. Carry-over effects are among the more recently recognized of these processes, yet one of the most frequently cited. However, references to carry-over effects often conflate them with other processes — especially those occurring during development — that operate via fundamentally different mechanisms. This limits the proper identification of carry-over effects and constrains our ability to understand the evolutionary consequences of inter-individual differences. When redefined as a reversible process linking trade-offs between traits that affect future fitness, carry-over effects can be separated from other causes of inter-individual differences and applied to some long-standing problems in evolutionary ecology, such as understanding the trade-off between survival and reproduction. Carry-over effects thus represent a flexible process that can rapidly mediate an individual’s response to its environment, affect a population’s evolutionary trajectory, and potentially impact eco-evolutionary dynamics. As such, carry-over effects must be considered as distinct from other processes causing inter-individual differences and should be more fully integrated into theoretical frameworks connecting ecological and evolutionary processes.
