Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 1999 number 1

According to theory, animals should attempt to optimize the allocation of resources among the competing demands for reproduction, growth, survival, and of course maintenance, so as to maximize lifetime reproductive output. Trade-offs between immune competence and other life-history attributes have received much of this research interest because of the potential returns to our understanding of population processes in a changing environment.
The main modern hypotheses about ecological factors and evolutionary reasons of wide range variability of immunocompetence in population of animals are reviewed in this paper.