A LIMITS-ORIENTED APPROACH TO EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY

Evolutionary ecology focuses on optimal traits to provide a mechanisti c understanding of ecological patterns. For some issues, however, it m ight be a mismatch to marry optimality and ecology. Given that many ec ological questions involve limits (to species distributions and abunda nces; to species diversity), it might be useful to focus on 'limiting traits' rather than optimal traits; that is, to understand ecological limits it might be useful to identify the things that organisms do poo rly, and to study constraints on the evolution of these limiting trait s. While a limiting-traits approach has a long history in ecology, rel atively few studies have fully applied the approach, and some ecologic al issues have only recently been examined from this view.