Success comes at a cost, even for phages

As many a mother may tell you, expending the energy necessary to raise a clutch of kids can shave years off one's life. Trade-offs between reproductive success and survival have been demonstrated for a wide variety of organisms, in keeping with life history theory. In a new study published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Marianne De Paepe and Franзois Taddei asked whether these trade-offs extend to viruses, which are not--by some definitions--even alive.