9305584 Bradshaw Darwinian fitness is achieved through high survival, fast development, and prolific reproduction. Ideally, an organism would produce a large number of offspring, each with a high probability of surviving, on the day it is born. Clearly, organisms do not achieve this ideal; rather, the life cycle of organisms is a compromise between fast, safe development of reproductive age and number and quality of offspring produced. The pitcher-plant mosquito appears to circumvent this compromise: fast developing mosquitoes are prone neither to early death nor to reduced fecundity. Dr. Bradshaw's plans to determine whether evolution of a mosquito that is capable of faster, safer development and higher fecundity could occur. Mosquitoes that achieved high Darwinian fitness under good conditions may be less able to survive and reproduce under stressful conditions than are normal mosquitoes. If this proposition proves to be true, then fitness in the real world represents a compromise between maximizing gain in fitness under ideal conditions and minimizing loss to fitness under adverse conditions. %%% Studies such as these may indicate which portions of mosquito life cycles are adaptively rigid in response to adverse conditions, allowing more effective targeting of sensitive developmental stages to biological or chemical control. ***
