Animal Life History Inference
To survive and thrive amid competition for finite resources, organisms invest energy in fitness-maximizing traits, resulting in trade-offs. We apply Pareto optimality theory, a concept from engineering and economics, to identify these life-history trade-offs unbiasedly using single-cell transcriptomics in planarians. We have built the first individual-resolved single-cell atlas spanning the entire post-embryonic life cycle of Schmidtea mediterranea, demonstrating that Pareto analysis resolves this atlas into low-dimensional archetypes whose cell-type compositions track distinct life-history tasks.