Problem:

I'm thinking here about environmental disturbance or like climate change-driven warming. It seems as if there are two macroevolutionary ways to deal with environmental change:

1) Have short generation times, and evolve fast. For instance, the mosquito Wyeomyia smithii is under selection by the warming climate in North America and it has shown an evolutionary repsonse. The response is "detectable over a time interval as short as 5 years" (Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2001).

2) Be hardy, and 'try' to wait out changes. No real-world example to cite, but imagine a long-lived tree growing in an area that has become to warm for its seeds to effectively produce seedlings.

It seems intuitively like strategy 1 is better in the case of ongoing climate warming. However, we could easily imagine a 5-year hot spell followed by a return to the normal as part of natural weather variation. Perhaps in this situation strategy 2 is better.

Essentially, having a longevity/generation time/hardiness that matches the time-scale of the disturbance would be important - if the disturbance is long (or unidirectional) compared to your lifespan, evolving fast seems best; if the disturbance is short compared to your life, it seems best to wait it out.

Question: Is there theory that deals with this?

I suspect that I just need to hit the population genetics books again or something; or perhaps there's a massive tome by Gould I should be reading?

Does anyone know how to go about this search to explain it.