Fecundity seems to stop declining and plateaus at low levels very late in Drosophila melanogaster populations. Here we test whether this apparent cessation of reproductive aging by a population, herein referred to as fecundity plateaus, is robust under various environmental influences: namely, male age and nutrition. The effect of male age on late age fecundity patterns was tested by supplying ...

One of the most striking patterns in comparative biology is the negative correlation between lifespan and fecundity observed in comparisons among species. This pattern is consistent with the idea that organisms need to allocate a fixed energy budget among competing demands of growth, development, reproduction and somatic maintenance. However, exceptions to this pattern have been observed in man...

Woody vegetation spread over former croplands in Europe has created new unexploited habitats for forest organisms. Their ability to colonise them and thrive depends on life-history traits including fecundity, dormancy dispersal ability. The effects of these species distribution, abundance community assembly have been extensively studied fragmented landscapes. However, their consequences genetic...

Gene flow between crop fields and wild populations often results in hybrids with reduced fitness compared to their wild counterparts due to characteristics imparted by the crop genome. But the specifics of the evolutionary outcome of crop-wild gene flow may depend on context, varying due to local environmental conditions and genetic variation within and among wild populations and among crop lin...

Fecundity estimates used in a 2004 stock assessment to evaluate the overall health of the population of California sheephead Semicossyphus pulcher were based primarily on two studies. The first estimated the total fecundity of only nine individuals captured near Santa Catalina Island, California, and the second estimated batch fecundity of individuals taken from only one artificial reef. In ord...

Dairy goats are one of the most utilized domesticated animals in China. Here, we selected extreme populations based on differential fecundity in two Laoshan dairy goat populations. Utilizing deep sequencing we have generated 68.7 and 57.8 giga base of sequencing data, and identified 12,458,711 and 12,423,128 SNPs in the low fecundity and high fecundity groups, respectively. Following selective ...

The sterile insect technique (SIT) may reduce pest populations by allowing sufficient amount of irradiation-induced sterile males to mate with wild females whilst maintaining mating ability comparable to wild males. Although the SIT methods are well understood, the optimal sterilizing dose and processing development stage for application vary among species. To ensure effective pest control prog...

The brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens, sugar transporter gene 6 (Nlst6) is a facilitative glucose/fructose transporter (often called a passive carrier) expressed in midgut that mediates sugar transport from the midgut lumen to hemolymph. The influence of down regulating expression of sugar transporter genes on insect growth, development, and fecundity is unknown. Nonetheless, it is re...

two types of small-scale selection experiments were performed. (1) Artificial selection experiments were performed on age-specific female fecundity. Selection for early fecundity over three generations produced a statistically detectable direct response. There was no detectable indirect response in other life-history characters. Selection for late fecundity over three generations did not produc...

1. We report on a simulation study of increasing and stable populations working under two different hypotheses of density dependence of fecundity: the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis (HHH) and the individual adjustment hypothesis (IAH). Our aim is to find critical differences between the two regulatory hypotheses in natural populations. 2. Populations under HHH show a strong negative relations...