Praying mantises and some species of spiders are similar in that the male will offer themselves as food to their mate in order to ensure she is not hungry during the mating season.

These types seems very closely related to k and r selected species types. Are individuals in type II often k selected like the birds described or is their an intermediate category?

Another interesting effect of the seasonal deciduous forests is the fact that during the summer in the norther hemisphere global atmospheric CO2 levels will drop due to the deciduous forests photosynthesizing and storing CO2.

Can we go over the distinction between richness and diversity a bit more in class?

I was talking with a friend recently about human evolution and we both thought of this idea (the founder effect) in the context of colonizing different planets. I thought the idea of evolution taking a different path for colonists on mars for example could be a cool idea for a sci-fi movie.

I was under the impression that most hybrids were infertile so how often does this phenomenon actually occur?

Have two species ever coevolved so that they can begin mating together and producing fertile offspring and not infertile hybrids? Would this cause a new third species or would one species be combined with another?

The idea of natural selection seems so simple and logical when spelled out like this in a textbook that it is hard to believe the idea was not prevalent sooner. I think this section goes to show the importance of basic science as without the basis of knowledge Darwin and Wallace had the logical chain could not have been made.

I understand that theory can be used to deal with some of this complexity but how does an ecologist manage to do repeatable experiments in an environment and at a scale with such complexity and unpredictability?

I notice that this question comes up often in discussions of space exploration in particular. This is most likely because space exploration is one of the most extreme cases of basic science in that the information about a distant galaxy seemingly has little to no application on Earth.