Practice question

“Plant life-history” for growth-survival-fecundity triangle helps to classify. This relationship follows from the ecological mechanism represented by the terms in the item, not merely from an association between their names. Survivorship curves summarize age-specific mortality: Type I concentrates loss late in life, Type II approximates a constant hazard, and Type III concentrates loss early. They are empirical patterns, not rigid taxonomic rules. The remaining alternatives—“Carnivores”, “Bird migration”, “Keystone species”—refer to different states, processes, or scales and therefore do not express the same causal relationship. Selection favors the schedule that increases lifetime reproductive success under local mortality and resource conditions. Body size, development time, fecundity, parental investment, and generation length consequently tend to covary. This distinction matters because similar surface patterns can arise through different mechanisms, whereas ecological prediction depends on identifying the mechanism that actually changes rates. The cited framing is therefore most useful when treated as a conditional biological claim, with assumptions about scale and environmental context kept explicit.