Sexual harassment is common among poeciliid fish. In some fishes, males show a high frequency of sneak copulation; such sexual activity is costly to the females in terms of foraging efficiency. In mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), when males are present, the distance between females tends to decrease, and this behavior has been interpreted as an adaptive strategy to dilute the costs of male se...

The regulation of gene expression is essential for organismal form, function, and fitness. Complex organismal development from zygote to adult requires finely tuned expression of genes in space, time, and abundance. Proper expression of genes is also required for most other aspects of physiology and function. Even minor changes in gene expression have the potential to significantly impact pheno...

Interspecific resource competition is expected to select for divergence in resource use, weakening interspecific relative to intraspecific competition, thus promoting stable coexistence. More broadly, because interspecific competition reduces fitness, any mechanism of interspecific competition should generate selection favoring traits that weaken interspecific competition. However, species also...

Discussions about social behavior are generally limited to fitness effects of interactions occurring between conspecifics. However, many fitness relevant interactions take place between individuals belonging to different species. Our detailed knowledge about the role of hormones in intraspecific interactions provides a starting point to investigate how far interspecific interactions are governe...

A fundamental goal of evolutionary ecology is to understand how asymmetric competition influences phenotype expression, yet few studies have quantified the relative effects of intraand interspecific competition on phenotypes. We examined the effects of intraand interspecific larval competition on both discrete and continuous phenotype expression of the facultatively paedomorphic mole salamander...

Molecular confirmation of interspecific recombinants is essential to overcome the issues like self-pollination, environmental influence, and inadequacy of morphological characteristics during interspecific hybridization. The present study was conducted for genetic confirmation of mungbean (female) and mashbean (male) interspecific crosses using molecular markers. Initially, polymorphic random a...

We quantified four gait characteristics (stride length, stride frequency, step length and floating distance) over a range of running speeds in 11 lacertid lizard species known to vary in maximal sprint speed and microhabitat use. For each species, we measured snout-vent length (SVL), body mass and hindlimb length. We tested which variables determine sprint speed, how each species modulates spri...

Landscape genetics provides a valuable framework to understand how landscape features influence gene flow and to disentangle the factors that lead to discrete and/or clinal population structure. Here, we attempt to differentiate between these processes in a forest-dwelling small carnivore [European pine marten (Martes martes)]. Specifically, we used complementary analytical approaches to quanti...