This chapter reviews our understanding of the adaptive significance of variation in the length of incubation and gestation and of patterns of lactation in endotherms. Though similar questions might usefully be asked about incubation and gestation periods in invertebrates, fish, reptiles, and amphibia, questions of this kind have been more frequently asked about birds and mammals (see Lack 1960; Eisenberg 1981), and our understanding of the extent and distribution of interspecific differences in all three parameters is more advanced in these than in other groups of animals.
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