Title: Closing lecture, with remarkable AmP entries and a short outlook
Authors: Kooijman, Lika, Marn, Kearney, Marques, Pecquerie, Lavaud, Tjui-Yeuw
Affiliation: A-LIFE Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment, Faculty of Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Date: 2025/03/24
Event: DEB2025

My lecture has 3 chapters. I start with  some evaluation remarks about what I heard during the symposium, underscoring some highlights.

Then, we now have 6000 entries in the AmP collection, 2000 more than in 2023, with a median Mean Relative Error of 0.04 for some 90000 data sets. I will discuss some problems, propose partial solutions and explain for a small selection of entries why they are remarkable from a biological or methodological point of view. This will be not that easy to detect when one skims rapidly through the collection. Examples are

     a) ovoviviparous sharks incubate 1 or 2 yrs longer than data suggest, based on postnatal development.

         Illustrating to need of theory to interpret data

     b) why quite a few abj-entries have E_Hj very close to E_Hb as estimates, but this is not realistic and the result of absence of data on early growth.

         Illustrating the need to detailed data to estimate parameters

     c) slow growth can only be captured with a low somatic maintenance, with the need to make sure that the maintenance ratio remains smaller than one.

Finaly I make some remarks on possible future developments in DEB theory, linking levels of organisation and linking parameter values to eco-physiological properties.
   Coral reefs, for instance, vary little in conditions over the seasons, which makes it likely that the inhabiting species have a low growth rate and so a low somatic maintenance.
   By contrast, the growing season shortens towards the poles, which might relate to high maintenance on the basis of the waste-to-hurry principle.
   A kind of inter-species variant of the Bergmann rule, where the intra-species variant is based on food density.
   I expect new developments in the eco-evolutionary controls of the position of species in the altricial-precocial spectrum to supplements our earlier findings that
   the cumulated total weight of neonates more or less equals the ultimate mother weight.
   Altricial neonates tend to be relatively small and many with links to population dynamics and trophic position, so to MacArthur's r/K-selection.
   The aim is to build on the structure of meta-theory, by not only finding patterns in parameter values, but also patterns in these patterns
   to improve our understanding of underlying evolutionary processes..