Figure 6.

Shorter life promotes fitness more when adults are greedier. Increasing food consumption by adults favors adaptive death. (a) Scheme showing food consumption rate combinations for adults and larvae. In these simulations, adults produced 4 progeny only on day 1. (b) Heat maps depicting final dauer yield for the 3 levels of adult food consumption shown in (a). (c) Share of food consumed by adults at different food consumption rates. Color code for 3 adult food consumption rates (surrounding box) as in (a). Color code for 5 lifespans shown in (c). (d) Summary of conclusions based on behavior of virtual Caenorhabditis elegans. Colony fitness is optimized by maximizing efficiency of production of dauers from available food. Futile food consumption, that is that not leading to dauer production, is minimized by reducing individual fitness in order to increase colony fitness. This involves programmed death of adults (consumer sacrifice‐type adaptive death) and optimization of population structure to avoid an excess of early larvae that are doomed to starve by means of a brief, early burst of reproduction