The sexual ontogeny and developmental patterns of organisms are incredibly diverse. Much of this diversity is rooted in interspecific variability in sex allocation, which is the provision of resources to either female or male reproduction in order to optimize reproductive success for individuals and populations. Protogynous hermaphroditismrefers to a life-history characteristic, whereby individuals in a population change sex from functional females to functional males at some point during their life span. Hence, resource investment is more heavily allocated to female reproduction early in the life span, and later this investment switches to male reproduction. Hermaphroditism has been documented in a range of taxa, including both terrestrial and marine invertebrates and vertebrates, but is highly common and very well studied in many families of teleost fishes, particularly coral reef fishes with complex social systems, as is evidenced by the high volume of scientific literature...
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Taylor, B.M. (2017). Protogynous Hermaphroditism. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1950-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1950-1
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