ATING of any naturally outbreeding organism is commonly assumed to be AI at random in the absence of artificial controls. This assumption is basic to many of the mathematical models used in population genetics. I t may have validity for animals, particularly in populations of relatively long standing. In some plants, however, differences in time of maturity of the male and female flowers arisin...

Full factorial breeding designs are useful for quantifying the amount of additive genetic, nonadditive genetic, and maternal variance that explain phenotypic traits. Such variance estimates are important for examining evolutionary potential. Traditionally, full factorial mating designs have been analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance, which may produce negative variance values and is not...

Simulation models of mass trapping and mating disruption were developed based on correlated random walks (CRW) of flying male moths searching for females. Males encountered pheromone plumes, transformed into a circular probability surface represented as an effective attraction radius (EAR), from females and from dispensers with or without traps. In simulations, parameters of dispenser EAR and d...

We show that the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection in Ewens' sense is valid in the case of fertility selection: the additive genetic variance in fertility divided by the mean fertility is exactly equal to the partial change in the mean fertility from the current generation to the next. This partial change is the increase in the mean additive value caused by frequency changes from on gene...

BACKGROUND Saccharomyces yeasts are an important model system in many areas of biological research. Very little is known about their ecology and evolution in the wild, but interest in this natural history is growing. Extensive work with lab strains in the last century uncovered the Saccharomyces life cycle. When nutrient limited, a diploid yeast cell will form four haploid spores encased in a p...

Male frogs may mate several times throughout a breeding season; however, energy and time constraints of producing mature eggs severely limit breeding opportunities for a female (Berven 1981; Andersson 1994). Male competition for females is expected because the operational sex ratio is malebiased (Emlen 1976; Kvarnemo & Ahnesjö 1996). Yet anisogamy dictates that females are usually the choosier ...

Many populations of the seed-harvester ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus exhibit genetic caste determination (GCD) generated by the interbreeding of two distinct yet interdependent lineages. Same-lineage matings are genetically predestined to become female reproductives (gynes) whereas alternate-lineage matings become workers. The perpetuation of this system requires that reproductives of both lineages...

Conventionally, the extraordinary diversity of the vertebrate major histocompatibility complex (MHC is thought to have evolved in response to parasites and pathogens affecting fitness. More recently, reproductive mechanisms such as disassortative mating have been suggested as alternative mechanisms maintaining MHC diversity. A large unmanaged population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries L.) was used to...

Mating system plays a determinant role in the maintenance and distribution of genetic variation. Difficulties in applying standard methods of indirect inferences onto parasitic life-cycles partly explain the current lack of knowledge on parasite mating systems. The present study develops a combination of direct and indirect inference methods circumventing such difficulties, and illustrates in p...

Polygynous mating results in nonrandom sampling of the adult male gamete pool in each generation, thereby increasing the rate of genetic drift. In principle, genetic paternity analysis can be used to infer the effective number of breeding males (Nebm). However, this requires genetic data from an exhaustive sample of candidate males. Here we describe a new approach to estimate Nebm using a rejec...