What can life tables tell us about wild animal mortality?

<p>One aim of comparative population dynamics is to understand the patterns of mortality across the tree of life. For example, “why do some animals live a long time, while others live only a short time?”, and, “to what extent do closely related species share mortality and fecundity patterns?”. One approach to address these kinds of questions is to collect mortality data from different species species, to characterise their mortality trajectories using survival/mortality models fitted to the data, to extract the descriptive parameters from these models, and then to conduct phylogenetic analyses that use these parameter estimates as traits. </p> <p>High-quality individual-based data on mortality are relatively rare, and such data sets are phylogenetically clustered. Instead, it is more common to find life table data that, in their most basic form, follow cohorts and simply record the number of individuals remaining alive at each time step. Hundreds of published life tables exist and these represent a potentially rich and tempting resource. However, the data are of varying quality and we do not know how much confidence we can have in estimates derived from them. For example, there is considerable variation in sample size, sampling intensity, and environmental heterogeneity between life tables from different species...