The deleterious effects of inbreeding have long been known, and inbreeding can increase the risk of extinction for local populations in metapopulations. However, other consequences of inbreeding in metapopulations are still not well understood. Here we show the presence of strong inbreeding depression in a rockpool metapopulation of the planktonic freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna, which repr...

Microevolution is typically ignored as a factor directly affecting ongoing population dynamics. We show here that density-dependent natural selection has a direct and measurable effect on a planktonic predator-prey interaction. We kept populations of Brachionus calyciflorus, a monogonont rotifer that exhibits cyclical parthenogenesis, in continuous flow-through cultures (chemostats) for more th...

Inferring reproductive and demographic parameters of populations is crucial to our understanding of species ecology and evolutionary potential but can be challenging, especially in partially clonal organisms. Here, we describe a new and accurate method, cloncase, for estimating both the rate of sexual vs. asexual reproduction and the effective population size, based on the frequency of clonemat...

This paper summarizes a function-based approach to create 2D flow animations. We use periodic functions to create cyclical animations that represent 2D flow. These periodic functions are constructed with an extremely simple algorithm from a set of oriented lines. The speed and orientation of the flow are described directly by the orientation and the lengths of these oriented lines. The resultin...

While workers of almost all subspecies of honeybee are able to lay only haploid male eggs, Apis mellifera capensis workers are able to produce diploid female eggs by thelytokous parthenogenesis. Cytological analyses have shown that during parthenogenesis, egg diploidy is restored by fusion of the two central meiotic products. This peculiarity of the Cape bee preserves two products of a single m...

In order to improve the global search performance of Komodo Mlipir Algorithm, this paper proposed two adaptive Algorithms with variable fixed parameters (IKMA-1; IKMA-2). Among them, IKMA-1 adaptively controls parthenogenesis radius female dragons achieve more efficient conversion and local search. Second, IKMA-2 introduces weighting factors “mlipir” movement formula performance. ...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.12.017 0003-3472/© 2014 The Association for the Study of A Parthenogenesis is an asexual mode of reproduction that is rare in nature compared to sex. Parthenogenetic animals are derived from sexual progenitors, but little is known about how transitions to parthenogenesis evolve and persist. One hypothesis is that selection promotes transitions to parthen...

A recent study reports striking similarities in the origin and spread of parthenogenesis in two distantly related animals of the Australian arid zone, suggesting that the loss of sex was driven by a very general selective force.

Dormancy is a common adaptation in invertebrates to survive harsh conditions. Triggered by environmental cues, populations produce resting eggs that allow them to survive temporally unsuitable conditions. Daphnia magna is a crustacean that reproduces by cyclical parthenogenesis, alternating between the production of asexual offspring and the sexual reproduction of diapausing eggs (ephippia). Pr...

It is well known that most daphnid species have several attractive life history characteris‐ tics such as cyclical parthenogenesis, environmental sex determination, and predator-in‐ duced defense formation. Recent advances in high-throughput omics technologies make it easy to obtain a huge number of potential candidate factors involved in environmental stimuli-triggered phenotypic alterations. ...