J.M.C. HUTCHINSON, J.M. McNAMARA, A.I. HOUSTON & F. VOLLRATH 1997. Dyar’s Rule and the Investment Principle: the consequences of a size-dependent feeding rate when growth is discontinuous. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 352:113–138

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Errata

On page 137, the second equation should have as the denominator within the bracket “a_i”, not “α_i”. This is just a typo uncorrected by the printers that has not affected our own calculations.
A more minor error is that John McNamara was based at the School of Mathematics at Bristol Univerisity, not the School of Biological Sciences.

Update

Esperk & Tammaru (2004) is an explicit test of our theory’s assumptions and predictions. It rejects the idea that lepidopteran larvae are limited in their growth rate by size of their mouthparts (which grow only between moults). Of course this need not imply that the investment principle does not hold in other arthropods.
Recent work has looked at the question of why some species have a variable number of instars: Esperk et al. (2007), Esperk, Tammaru & Nylin (2007), Etilé & Despland (2008).
Oxygen-depletion has been considered as mechanism triggering moulting: see Kivelä et al. (2016) for a mechanistic model.

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