Behavioural change over the annual cycle: optimal annual routines

- Annual cycles are general phenomenon on Earth.
- Organisms show a diverse set of adaptations to environmental seasonality.
- Optimal annual routine models are powerful tools to analyse annual behaviour.
- Studying invertebrate life histories might be a fruitful approach to test annual routine models.

Seasonally alternating environmental conditions define annual cycles all over the world. Organisms adapt to these cycles by diverse set of life histories. The evolutionary drivers of this diversity, however, are not fully understood. Here I flash some of these life history variations, outline the modelling technique of optimal annual routines and show a few modelling examples to illustrate the power of optimal annual routines to advance our understanding of annual behaviour. I propose that studying invertebrate life history can be a promising avenue to test optimal annual routine models.