Search results for "LIFE-HISTORY"
showing 10 items of 49 documents
Senescence and longevity : from physiological mechanisms to evolutionary processes : studies in birds and mammals
2012
There is an incredible diversity of lifespan in the animal kingdom ranging from a few days for small gastrotrichs worms to several hundred of years for some bivalves or tortoises. This amazing diversity has long questioned biology researchers. The growing interest in the phenomenon of aging, mainly due to the increase in life expectancy in humans, has questioned researchers on processes that determine patterns of longevity and ageing. On the one hand, biomedical and biogerontological studies helped describe numerous cellular and physiological mechanisms related to aging. Among these mechanisms, oxidative stress has been identified as playing a major role, through life-time accumulation of d…
Changing agricultural practices modifies the species and trait composition of the weed flora. A simulation study using a cropping system model
2013
International audience; Cropping systems change over time to adapt to socio-economical and environmental constraints and to profit from technological innovations. These changes can result in unexpected side-effects which are difficult to determine in fields. The objective of the present study was to use a cropping system model to evaluate the impacts of modified agricultural practices ex ante on weeds. The FLORSYS model quantifies the effect of crop succession, management techniques and climate on multi-specific weed dynamics over the years; it was parameterized with functional relationships predicting model parameters (e.g. pre-emergent seedling mortality) from species traits (e.g. seed ma…
External and internal elimination of supernumerary larvae in the whitefly parasitoid Eretmocerus mundus Mercet (Hymenoptera: Aphelinidae)
2008
Abstract The solitary parasitoid Eretmocerus mundus Mercet (Hymenoptera: Aphelinidae) is one of the key biological control agents of the whitefly Bemisia argentifolii Bellows & Perring, also known as B. tabaci (Gennadius) B-biotype (Homoptera: Aleyrodidae). We present new information on its biology, and particularly about larval elimination during the first instar in cases of superparasitism. For the first time, physical elimination of supernumerary larvae was observed, both outside and inside the host. These findings are documented with confocal microscopy images and video recordings. We observed more than 350 B. argentifolii nymphs, parasitized with one, two or more than two larvae. Physi…
Predator-Induced Plasticity on Warning Signal and Larval Life-History Traits of the Aposematic Wood Tiger Moth, Arctia plantaginis
2021
Predator-induced plasticity in life-history and antipredator traits during the larval period has been extensively studied in organisms with complex life-histories. However, it is unclear whether different levels of predation could induce warning signals in aposematic organisms. Here, we investigated whether predator-simulated handling affects warning coloration and life-history traits in the aposematic wood tiger moth larva, Arctia plantaginis. As juveniles, a larger orange patch on an otherwise black body signifies a more efficient warning signal against predators but this comes at the costs of conspicuousness and thermoregulation. Given this, one would expect that an increase in predation…
Marine food web perspective to fisheries-induced evolution
2021
Fisheries exploitation can cause genetic changes in heritable traits of targeted stocks. The direction of selective pressure forced by harvest acts typically in reverse to natural selection and selects for explicit life-histories, usually for younger and smaller spawners with deprived spawning potential. While the consequences that such selection might have on the populational dynamics of a single species are well emphasised, we are just beginning to perceive the variety and severity of its propagating effects within the entire marine food webs and ecosystems. Here, we highlight the potential pathways in which fishing-induced evolution, driven by size-selective fishing, might resonate throu…
New insights on the role of ecology and life-history in social evolution
2017
Biological altruism, defined as a behaviour that benefits others at an apparent cost to the focal individual, is found abundantly across different levels of biological organization. While kin selection has been useful for explaining both cooperation and conflict in specialized cooperative societies, more theoretical work has to be done to develop models for realistic ecological and life-history contexts. This thesis aims to fill this gap by providing several new insights on the role of ecology and life-history in various social systems. Firstly, I propose a model that incorporates realistic ecological mechanisms of population regulation and study how different population regulation mechanisms affe…
Probabilistic maturation reaction norms assessed from mark-recaptures of wild fish in their natural habitat
2014
Published version of an article in the journal: Ecology and Evolution. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1044 Open Access Reaction norms are a valuable tool in evolutionary biology. Lately, the probabilistic maturation reaction norm approach, describing probabilities of maturing at combinations of age and body size, has been much applied for testing whether phenotypic changes in exploited populations of fish are mainly plastic or involving an evolutionary component. However, due to typical field data limitations, with imperfect knowledge about individual life histories, this demographic method still needs to be assessed. Using 13 years of direct mark-recap…
Symbiotic status alters fungal eco‐evolutionary offspring trajectories
2023
Despite host-fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life-history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free-living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orders of variation in spore size. Evolutionary transitions in symbiotic status correlated with shifts in spore size, but the strength of this effect varied widely among phyla. Symbiotic status explained more variation than climatic variables in the current distribution of…
Evolutionary constraints of warning signals : a genetic trade-off between the efficacy of larval and adult warning coloration can maintain variation …
2016
To predict evolutionary responses of warning signals under selection, we need to determine the inheritance pattern of the signals, and how they are genetically correlated with other traits contributing to fitness. Furthermore, protective coloration often undergoes remarkable changes within an individual's lifecycle, requiring us to quantify the genetic constraints of adaptive coloration across all the relevant life stages. Based on a 12 generation pedigree with > 11,000 individuals of the wood tiger moth (Arctia plantaginis), we show that high primary defense as a larva (large warning signal) results in weaker defenses as adult (less efficient warning color), due to the negative genetic cor…
Data from: Ecological conditions alter cooperative behaviour and its costs in a chemically defended sawfly
2018
The evolution of cooperation and social behaviour is often studied in isolation from the ecology of organisms. Yet, the selective environment under which individuals evolve is much more complex in nature, consisting of ecological and abiotic interactions in addition to social ones. Here we measured the life-history costs of cooperative chemical defence in a gregarious social herbivore, Diprion pini pine sawfly larvae, and how these costs vary under different ecological conditions. We ran a rearing experiment where we manipulated diet (resin content) and attack intensity by repeatedly harassing larvae to produce a chemical defence. We show that forcing individuals to allocate more to coopera…