Competition Relatedness And Efficiency

Seger has argued that, if a law of diminishing returns of personal fitness with increasing consumption of a limiting resource applies, a greater increment to inclusive fitness3 may accrue to an individual by sharing the resource with its relatives than by excluding them. That is, from the point of view of an individual's inclusive fitness, there will exist an optimal relation between resource abundance, conversion efficiency (in terms of increment in personal fitness per resource unit consumed) and competitor abundance and relatedness to the subject. Here, this is rendered more concrete by deriving expressions for the optimum consumption rate for any one of a number of related individuals competing for a finite resource.