Immune defense and reproduction are physiologically and energetically demanding processes and have been observed to trade off in a diversity of female insects. Increased reproductive effort results in reduced immunity, and reciprocally, infection and activation of the immune system reduce reproductive output. This trade-off can manifest at the physiological level (within an individual) and at t...

Resource-allocation decisions vary with life-history strategy, and growing evidence suggests that long-lived endothermic vertebrates direct resources toward growth and self-maintenance when young, increasing allocation toward reproductive effort over time. Few studies have tracked the ontogeny of resource allocation (energy, steroid hormones, etc.) in long-lived ectothermic vertebrates, limitin...

Uneven sharing of reproduction (reproductive skew) among members of a cooperative animal society is one of the key features associated with advanced sociality and task specialization. Allocation of reproduction varies greatly among taxa, and reproductive skew models are evolutionary models that aim at explaining this variation. We tested reproductive skew theory using the Australian social allo...

The introduction, more than half a century ago, of the randomized trial in which allocation to the experimental and control interventions occurs by chance has been a pivotal point in the evaluation of therapeutic ef®cacy. It is now well accepted that the gold standard in such evaluation is the welldesigned controlled, clinical experiment that has high methodological rigour so that bias can be m...

Background and Aims Trait-based plant ecology attempts to use small numbers of functional traits to predict plant ecological strategies. However, a major gap exists between our understanding of organ-level ecophysiological traits and our understanding of whole-plant fitness and environmental adaptation. In this gap lie whole-plant organizational traits, including those that describe how plant b...

When resources are scarce, female mammals should face a trade-off between lactation and other life-history traits such as growth, survival and subsequent reproduction. Kangaroos are ideal to test predictions about reproductive costs because they may simultaneously lactate and carry a young, and have indeterminate growth and a long breeding season. An earlier study in three of our five study pop...

AIMS Agronomy and breeding actively search for options to enhance cereal grain Zn density. Quantifying internal (re-)allocation of Zn as affected by soil and crop management or genotype is crucial. We present experiments supporting the development of a conceptual model of whole plant Zn allocation and re-allocation in rice. METHODS Two solution culture experiments using (70)Zn applications at...

Parents may adapt their offspring sex ratio in response to their own phenotype and environmental conditions. The most significant causes for adaptive sex-ratio variation might express themselves as different distributions of fitness components between sexes along a given variable. Several causes for differential sex allocation in raptors with reversed sexual size dimorphism have been suggested....