Males compete over mating and fertilization, and often harm females in the process. Inclusive fitness theory predicts that increasing relatedness within groups of males may relax competition and discourage male harm of females as males gain indirect benefits. Recent studies in Drosophila melanogaster are consistent with these predictions, and have found that within-group male relatedness increa...

The healing function of theater is reflected in all human cultures. Today, therapists and scientists work with psychodrama and drama therapy, often describing theater as the art form closest to life itself. In a unique cooperation between professional actors and a dance movement therapist/pain researcher, patients with fibromyalgia have first been trained in body and voice expression and therea...

Classical models studying the evolution of self-fertilization in plants conclude that only complete selfing and complete outcrossing are evolutionarily stable. In contrast with this prediction, 42% of seed-plant species are reported to have rates of self-fertilization between 0.2 and 0.8. We propose that many previous models fail to predict intermediate selfing rates because they do not allow f...

Fertilization assurance (Baker's contention) and multilocus coadaptation (Allard's argument) are two distinct hypotheses for the adaptive significance of self-fertilization in hermaphroditic taxa, and both scenarios have been invoked to rationalize isogenicity via incest in various plants and invertebrate animals with predominant selfing. Here we contrast Allard's argument and Baker's contentio...

Primers for 36 microsatellite loci were developed and employed to characterize genetic stocks and detect possible outcrossing between highly inbred laboratory strains of the self-fertilizing mangrove killifish, Kryptolebias marmoratus. From attempted crosses involving hermaphrodites from particular geographic strains and gonochoristic males from others, 2 among a total of 32 surveyed progenies ...

Plant fertilization is achieved through the involvement of various pollen-pistil interactions. Self-/non-self-recognition in pollination is important to avoid inbreeding, and directional and sustainable control of pollen tube growth is critical for the pollen tube to deliver male germ cells. Recently, various secreted peptides (polypeptides) have been reported to be involved in cell-cell commun...

Among vertebrate animals, only the mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus) was known to self-fertilize. Here, we use microsatellite analyses to document a high selfing rate (97%) in a related nominal species, Kryptolebias ocellatus, which likewise is androdioecious (populations consist of males and hermaphrodites). In contrast, we find no evidence of self-fertilization in Kryptolebias caudom...

Information from Literature Much has been published about pollination, pollinators, pollinizers, fertilization and fruit set in text books and periodicals. The definitions are not difficult. Pollination is the movement of pollen among compatible flowering plants (cross-pollination) or from anthers to stigmas on the same plant or different plants of the same clone (self-pollination). Many plants...

Self-fertilization is widely believed to be an "evolutionary dead end" [1, 2], increasing the risk of extinction [3] and the accumulation of deleterious mutations in genomes [4]. Strikingly, while the failure to adapt has always been central to the dead-end hypothesis [1, 2], there are no quantitative genetic selection experiments comparing the response to positive selection in selfing versus o...