Nutritional state – a survival kit for brooding pipefish fathers

Nutritional state – a survival kit for brooding pipefish fathers

A parent’s nutritional state may influence its ability to provide care to offspring and ability to handle infections. In the broad-nosed pipefish, Syngnathus typhle, males care for their offspring by brooding the developing embryos in a brood pouch, providing nutrients and oxygen, resembling a pregnancy. Here, we demonstrate that the nutritional state of pregnant males covaries with their own s...

Evolutionary ecology of pipefish brooding structures: embryo survival and growth do not improve with a pouch

For animals that reproduce in water, many adaptations in life-history traits such as egg size, parental care, and behaviors that relate to embryo oxygenation are still poorly understood. In pipefishes, seahorses and seadragons, males care for the embryos either in some sort of brood pouch, or attached ventrally to the skin on their belly or tail. Typically, egg size is larger in the brood pouch...

Brooding fathers, not siblings, take up nutrients from embryos.

It is well known that many animals with placenta-like structures provide their embryos with nutrients and oxygen. However, we demonstrate here that nutrients can pass the other way, from embryos to the parent. The study was done on a pipefish, Syngnathus typhle, in which males brood fertilized eggs in a brood pouch for several weeks. Earlier research has found a reduction of embryo numbers duri...

Effects of an environmental estrogen on male Gulf pipefish, Syngnathus scovelli (Evermann and Kendall), a male brooding teleost.

A Survival Kit on Quantile Estimation

Questions concerning risk management in nance and premium calculation in non-life insurance often involve quantile estimation. We give an introduction to the basic extreme value theory which yields a method-ological basis for the analysis of such questions.