Parental care is a widespread and ecologically relevant adaptation known to enhance the developmental environment of offspring. Parental behaviors, however, may entail both costs and benefits for developing offspring. In Children's pythons (Antaresia childreni), we monitored both maternal egg-brooding behavior and intra-clutch oxygen partial pressure (PO2) in real-time to assess the effects of ...

Few studies have examined how avian life-history traits vary within populations as elevation increases and climate becomes more severe. We compared egg and clutch sizes of Mountain Bluebirds (Sialia currucoides) nesting at two elevations (1500 m and 2500 m above sea level) in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming over two years. Eggs laid by females at the high-elevation site were, on average, signi...

Dolenec, Z.: Some breeding traits of the pied wagtail (Motacilla alba) in NW Croatia. Nat. Croat., Vol. 20, No. 1., 209–214, 2011, Zagreb. In this study, some key aspects of the breeding performance of the pied wagtail are reported for the first time in northwestern Croatian. Only first clutches are included. The average egg length was 20.04 mm, breadth = 14.96 mm, volume = 2276.41 mm3 and egg ...

To enable a realistic automated manual transmission (AMT) system performance evaluation and rapid prototyping, this paper focuses on constructing a practical Simulink model and a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) real-time simulation. The working principle and dynamic characteristics of the AMT system are first explored. The driveline, the engine control, and the dry clutch are modelled and analysed. ...

Since David Lack first proposed that birds rear as many young as they can nourish, food limitation has been accepted as the primary explanation for variation in clutch size and other life-history traits in birds. The importance of food limitation in life-history variation, however, was recently questioned on theoretical grounds. Here, we show that clutch size differences between two populations...

1. Latitudinal variation in clutch sizes of birds is a well described, but poorly understood pattern. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but few have been experimentally tested, and none have been universally accepted by researchers. 2. The nest size hypothesis posits that higher nest predation in the tropics favours selection for smaller nests and thereby constrains clutch size by shrinking a...

The study of life history variation is central to the evolutionary theory. In many ectothermic lineages, including lizards, life history traits are plastic and relate to several sources of variation including body size, which is both a factor and a life history trait likely to modulate reproductive parameters. Larger species within a lineage, for example tend to be more fecund and have larger c...

Macrocyclops distinctus, Megacyclops viridis, and Mesocyclops pehpeiensis, which are common in rice fields during the summer season in Nagasaki, Japan, showed variable potentialities as biological control agents of larval Aedes albopictus, Culex tritaeniorhynchus, and Anopheles minimus in the laboratory. Macrocyclops distinctus and M. viridis, the largest copepod species, had fewer eggs within ...