Effects of salinity on fertilization, embryonic stage, and early larval development and growth performances of short-spined white sea urchin, Salmacis sphaeroides were conducted under a controlled laboratory condition. The experiment was carried out with seven salinity treatments (15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 PSU), each of which was triplicated. Significantly highest fertilization success was ...

The cestode Schistocephalus solidus is a frequent parasite of three-spined sticklebacks and has a large impact on its host's fitness. Selection pressure should therefore be high on stickleback defence mechanisms, like an efficient immune system, and also on parasite strategies to overcome these. Even though there are indications for manipulation of the immune system of its specific second inter...

In the past decade, there has been a new effort to understand the ecology that drives population divergence and speciation. It is well established in theory that speciation is most likely to occur when a trait that is under divergent natural selection in different populations is also used in mate choice. Such traits have been dubbed ‘magic traits’ (Gavrilets, 2004) and, although there appears t...

Selection pressures that act differently on males and females produce numerous differences between the sexes in morphology and behaviour. However, apart from the controversial report that males have slightly heavier brains than females in humans, evidence for substantial sexual dimorphism in brain size is scarce. This apparent sexual uniformity is surprising given that sexually distinct selecti...

Intraspecific variation in the number of vertebrae is taxonomically widespread, and both genetic and environmental factors are known to contribute to this variation. However, the relative importance of genetic versus environmental influences on variation in vertebral number has seldom been investigated with study designs that minimize bias due to non-additive genetic and maternal influences. We...