Life mating

[Raiden]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Surely that'd be selected against? A species who can only produce one child per male at once would be out-competed by an identical species which allows for reproductive polygamy.

I never said that each pair would only make one child.

R-strategist organisms are organisms that have lots and lots of offspring and provide zero parental care, and K-strategists are organisms that have one or a few children and provide extensive care until adulthood or sub-adulthood.

Of course, this is a spectrum, and many organisms fall somewhere inbetween "absolute R" and "absolute K". Each side has a different evolutionary advantage; K's ensure that their offspring make it to adulthood (which will almost always have less predators than juveniles), while R's make it so that some offspring will almost surely make it to adulthood because of the sheer numbers of them.

There are some things about the whole "tsaheylu thing" that don't make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, but I think that is implied, being science fiction.

The other thing is that "Eywa" (which is really just a massive super-organism with intelligence and lots of organic servers and hard disks to store things in) may have been able to manipulate the evolution of the species to be a certain way.