Search results for "Reproduction"
showing 10 items of 752 documents
Within-season movements of Alpine songbird distributions are driven by fine-scale environmental characteristics
2020
AbstractInformation about distribution and habitat use of organisms is crucial for conservation. Bird distribution within the breeding season has been usually considered static, but this assumption has been questioned. Within-season movements may allow birds to track changes in habitat quality or to adjust site choice between subsequent breeding attempts. Such movements are especially likely in temperate mountains, given the substantial environmental heterogeneity and changes occurring during bird breeding season. We investigated the within-season movements of breeding songbirds in the European Alps in spring-summer 2018, using repeated point counts and dynamic occupancy models. For all the…
Evolutionary conservation advice for despotic populations: habitat heterogeneity favours conflict and reduces productivity in Seychelles magpie robins
2010
Individual preferences for good habitat are often thought to have a beneficial stabilizing effect for populations. However, if individuals preferentially compete for better-quality territories, these may become hotspots of conflict. We show that, in an endangered species, this process decreases the productivity of favoured territories to the extent that differences in productivity between territories disappear. Unlike predictions from current demographic theory on site-dependent population regulation (ideal despotic distribution), we show that population productivity is reduced if resources are distributed unevenly in space. Competition for high-quality habitat can thus have detrimental con…
Experimental evidence for a cost of resistance to the fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, for the palmate newt, Lissotriton helveticus
2013
Background Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the causative agent of chytridiomycosis, is decimating amphibians worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the majority of studies have therefore concentrated on documenting morbidity and mortality of susceptible species and projecting population consequences as a consequence of this emerging infectious disease. Currently, there is a paucity of studies investigating the sub-lethal costs of Bd in apparently asymptomatic species, particularly in controlled experimental conditions. Here we report the consequences of a single dose of B. dendrobatidis zoospores on captive adult palmate newts (Lissotriton helveticus) for morphological and behavioural traits that …
Post-copulatory sexual selection allows females to alleviate the fitness costs incurred when mating with senescing males.
2019
8 pages; International audience; Male senescence has detrimental effects on reproductive success and offspring fitness. When females mate with multiple males during the same reproductive bout, post-copulatory sexual selection that operates either through sperm competition or cryptic female choice might allow females to skew fertilization success towards young males and as such limit the fitness costs incurred when eggs are fertilized by senescing males. Here, we experimentally tested this hypothesis. We artificially inseminated female North African houbara bustards with sperm from dyads of males of different (young and old) or similar ages (either young or old). Then, we assessed whether si…
No inbreeding depression in sperm storage ability or offspring viability in Drosophila melanogaster females.
2013
Mating between relatives usually decreases genetic quality of progeny as deleterious recessive alleles are expressed in inbred individuals. Inbreeding degrades sperm traits but its effects on sperm storage and fate within females are currently unknown. We quantified the relationship between the degrees of inbreeding relevant to natural populations (f=0, 0.25 and 0.50) and the number of sperm inseminated and stored, sperm swimming speed, long-term sperm viability while in storage, pattern of sperm precedence, mating latency, and offspring viability of female Drosophila melanogaster. The use of transgenic flies that have either red or green fluorescent sperm heads allowed us to distinguish tw…
Does evolution of iteroparous and semelparous reproduction call for spatially structured systems?
2000
A persistent question in the evolution of life histories is the fitness trade-off between reproducing only once (semelparity) in a lifetime or reproducing repeated times in different seasons (iteroparity). The problem can be formulated into a research agenda by assuming that one reproductive strategy is resident (has already evolved) and by asking whether invasion (evolution) of an alternative reproductive strategy is possible. For a spatially nonstructured system, Bulmer (1994) derived the relationship v + PA1 (PA is adult survival; vbS and bS are offspring numbers for iteroparous and semelparous breeding strategies, respectively) at which semelparous population cannot be invaded by an ite…
Temperature as a modulator of sexual selection
2018
A central question in ecology and evolution is to understand why sexual selection varies so much in strength across taxa; it has long been known that ecological factors are crucial to this. Temperature is a particularly salient abiotic ecological factor that modulates a wide range of physiological, morphological and behavioural traits, impacting individuals and populations at a global taxonomic scale. Furthermore, temperature exhibits substantial temporal variation (e.g. daily, seasonally and inter-seasonally), and hence for most species in the wild sexual selection will regularly unfold in a dynamic thermal environment. Unfortunately, studies have so far almost completely neglected the rol…
Endocrine correlates of the breeding asynchrony between two Corsican populations of Blue tits (Parus caeruleus)
2004
International audience; Analyses of the development of the reproductive system in seasonally breeding birds in the framework of long-term ecological studies are rare. Here, we present the Wrst results of such a study in two Corsican populations of a European passerine bird, the blue tit (Parus caeruleus). The two study populations occupy diVerent oak habitats and are separated by only 25km. Despite their close proximity, they show a one-month diVerence in onset of egg laying, even after controlling for altitude. This micro-geographic diVerence in breeding date appears adaptive because both study populations raise chicks when food is most plentiful. In our study, males reached their maximum …
The evolution of sperm morphometry in pheasants
2007
7 pages; International audience; Post-copulatory sexual selection is thought to be a potent evolutionary force driving the diversification of sperm shape and function across species. In birds, insemination and fertilization are separated in time and sperm storage increases the duration of sperm-female interaction and hence the opportunity for sperm competition and cryptic female choice. We performed a comparative study of 24 pheasant species (Phasianidae, Galliformes) to establish the relative importance of sperm competition and the duration of sperm storage for the evolution of sperm morphometry (i.e. size of different sperm traits). We found that sperm size traits were negatively associat…
Fishery-induced selection for slow somatic growth in European eel
2012
International audience; Both theoretical and experimental studies have shown that fishing mortality can induce adaptive responses in body growth rates of fishes in the opposite direction of natural selection. We compared body growth rates in European eel (Anguilla anguilla) from three Mediterranean stocks subject to different fishing pressure. Results are consistent with the hypotheses that i) fast-growing individuals are more likely to survive until sexual maturity than slow-growing ones under natural conditions (no fishing) and ii) fishing can select for slow-growing individuals by removing fast-growing ones. Although the possibility of human-induced evolution seems remote for a panmictic…