Eric Charnov

Eric Lee Charnov (born 1947) is an American evolutionary ecologist known for his work on foraging behaviour and life history theory. He is best known for the marginal value theorem, which predicts when an animal should leave a patch of food, and for studies of sex allocation and of scaling and allometric rules in life histories. He studied at the University of Michigan and took his doctorate in evolutionary ecology at the University of Washington in 1973, and is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of New Mexico and the University of Utah. His later interests include metabolic ecology, the way temperature and body size set biological times and rates. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and wrote Life History Invariants and The Theory of Sex Allocation.