The diverse cichlid species flocks of the East African lakes provide a classical example of adaptive radiation. Territorial aggression is thought to influence the evolution of phenotypic diversity in this system. Most vertebrates mount hormonal (androgen, glucocorticoid) responses to a territorial challenge. These hormones, in turn, influence behavior and multiple aspects of physiology and morp...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Anopheles culicifacies Giles, the major malaria vector in Sri Lanka, exists as a species complex comprising two sympatric sibling species--species B and E. Species E is reported to be the major vector of Plasmodium vivax and P. falciparum parasites in Sri Lanka, whilst species B is a poor or nonvector as in India. Knowledge of the breeding habits of the two sibling speci...

Sibling cannibalism is commonly observed in marine species. For instance, intrabrood cannibalism has been documented in marine gastropods with direct development, suggesting a relationship between embryo behavior and the evolution of life history strategies. However, there has been little effort to document the factors driving sibling cannibalism in marine species. The kin selection theory sugg...

A software suite KINALYZER reconstructs full-sibling groups without parental information using data from codominant marker loci such as microsatellites. KINALYZER utilizes a new algorithm for sibling reconstruction in diploid organisms based on combinatorial optimization. KINALYZER makes use of a Minimum 2-Allele Set Cover approach based on Mendelian inheritance rules and finds the smallest num...

Intralocus sexual conflict (IASC) occurs when a trait under selection in one sex constrains the other sex from achieving its sex-specific fitness optimum. Selection pressures on body size often differ between the sexes across many species, including humans: among men individuals of average height enjoy the highest reproductive success, while shorter women have the highest reproductive success. ...

Across a wide range of taxa, larger mothers produce larger offspring. Theory assumes that larger, more fecund mothers create higher local densities of siblings, and so larger mothers produce larger offspring to offset sibling competition. This assumption has been debated for over 30 yr, but direct empirical tests are surprisingly rare. Here, we test two key assumptions of classic theories that ...

Sibling competition has been proposed as an important evolutionary pressure driving interspecific variation in developmental rates. We tested this hypothesis using rates of extra-pair paternity and brood parasitism, as well as the degree of hatching asynchrony, as indices of sibling competition in a comparative analysis of 70 species of bird. We found mixed support for the influence of sibling ...

—Nominally polyphagous species of herbivorous insects sometimes are comprised of multiple morphologically similar biological species with more specialized appetites. When meristic morphological traits cannot be found to distinguish such suspected sibling species, molecular data are increasingly sought as a source of evidence. A role for morphology in distinguishing such taxa might be reclaimed,...

Establishing family relationships, such as parentage and sibling relationships, can be extremely important in biological research, especially in wild species, as they are often key to understanding evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral processes. Because it is often not possible to determine familial relationships from field observations alone, the reconstruction of sibling relationships oft...

BACKGROUND Anopheles culicifacies, the main vector of human malaria in rural India, is a complex of five sibling species. Despite being phylogenetically related, a naturally selected subgroup species B of this sibling species complex is found to be a poor vector of malaria. We have attempted to understand the differences between vector and non-vector Anopheles culicifacies mosquitoes in terms o...