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Laziness is a winning evolutionary strategy that postpones extinction, leading scientists have found.

The previously overlooked law of natural selection based on “survival of the slacker” has been uncovered in a new study.

It suggests that being lazy can be a good way of ensuring the survival of individuals and even entire groups of species.

And the findings could have important implications for forecasting the fate of species affected by climate change.

While the research is based on lowly molluscs on the Atlantic Ocean’s floor, its authors believe it may also apply to higher animals.

Scientists carried out an extensive study of the energy needs of 299 species of extinct and living bivalves and gastropods spanning a period of five million years.

Those that managed to escape extinction to the present day tended to be "low maintenance" species with minimal energy requirements, they found.

Molluscs that had disappeared had higher metabolic rates than their still flourishing cousins.

US ecologist Professor Bruce Lieberman, who co-led the University of Kansas team, said: "Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish.

"The lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive. Instead of 'survival of the fittest', maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish'."

The findings, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, could help predict fate of species when affected by climate change.

Dr Luke Strotz, also from the University of Kansas, said: "In a sense, we're looking at a potential predictor of extinction probability.

"At the species level, metabolic rate isn't the be-all, end-all of extinction - there are a lot of factors at play. But these results say that the metabolic rate of an organism is a component of extinction likelihood.

"With a higher metabolic rate, a species is more likely to go extinct. So, it's another tool in the toolbox. This will increase our understanding of the mechanisms that drive extinction and help us to better determine the likelihood of a species going extinct."

Energy consumption had a bigger impact on species that were narrowly distributed, the researchers found.

Species with a narrowly confined range were far more likely to go extinct if they had a high metabolic rate.

Molluscs were used for the study because of the huge amount of available data on living and extinct bivalve and gastropod species.

The team now plans follow-up work to see if "survival of the laziest" natural selection applies to other kinds of animals.

Dr Strotz added: "There is a question as to whether this is just a mollusc phenomenon.

"There's some justification, given the size of this data set, and the long amount of time it covers, that it's generalisable. But you need to look - can it apply to vertebrates? Can it apply on land?"