In order to maximize their fitness, organisms in seasonal environments rely on external cues to optimally time their life-history stages. One of the most important zeitgeber to time reproduction is the photoperiod, but further environmental cues are assessed to fine-tune reproduction due to year-to-year variation in environmental conditions. However, in urbanized environments, the pervasive art...

Plasticity in reproductive physiology is one avenue by which environmental signals, such as poor quality food, can be coordinated with adaptive responses. Insects have the ability to resorb oocytes that are not oviposited. Oosorption is proposed to be an adaptive mechanism to optimize fitness in hostile environments, recouping resources that might otherwise be lost, and reinvesting them into fu...

Reproduction is a risky affair; a lifespan cost of maintaining reproductive capability, and of reproduction itself, has been demonstrated in a wide range of animal species. However, little is understood about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Most cost-of-reproduction studies simply ask how reproduction influences age at death, but are blind to the subjects' actual causes of death. L...

Uninfected animals can attempt to prevent parasitism in many ways. Behavioural avoidance of parasitized conspecifics, for instance, is documented several species. Interactions with conspecifics also, however, lead physiological changes uninfected animals, an effect that much less well studied, and consequently, understood. The way which exposure risk the physiology impacts those on animal fitne...

during the recent decades, substantial changes are made in the borders and contents of physiology as a basic course for the students in medicine. here some strategies are presented to preserve the classical and integrative approaches in teaching physiology, while these approaches extent our knowledge to molecular, sub-cellular and cellular levels.

Homeostasis is conventionally thought of merely as a synchronic (same time) servo-mechanism that maintains the status quo for organismal physiology. However, when seen from the perspective of developmental physiology, homeostasis is a robust, dynamic, intergenerational, diachronic (across-time) mechanism for the maintenance, perpetuation and modification of physiologic structure and function. T...

Evolutionary studies often assume that energy is the primary resource (i.e. "currency") at the heart of the survival-reproduction trade-off, despite recent evidence to the contrary. The evolutionary consequences of having a single trade-off currency versus multiple competing currencies are unknown. Using simulations, we modeled the evolution of either a single physiological currency between rep...