Maternal effects are widely documented in animals and plants, but not in fungi or other eukaryotes. A principal cause of maternal effects is asymmetrical parental investment in a zygote, creating greater maternal vs. paternal influence on offspring phenotypes. Asymmetrical investments are not limited to animals and plants, but are also prevalent in fungi and groups including apicomplexans, dino...

in this study records of 15723, 12108 and 5236 zel sheep for birth weight (bw), weaning weight (ww) and 6-month weight (6mw) traits were used. data has been collected by the jahad-e-keshavarzi organization of province of mazandaran during 1994-2009. the heritability of direct and maternal of growth traits was estimated using the univariate analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (reml). in ...

Just as phenotypic plasticity can evolve when developing individuals get informational cues about their future adult environment, deterministic maternal effects, where offspring trait values depend on the maternal environment, can evolve when mothers gain reliable information about the environments their offspring will face. Randomizing maternal effects (a type of diversifying bet hedging), whe...

the genetic parameters and (co) variance components of body weight at birth (bw), weaning (ww) and six months of age (bw6) and average daily gain (adg) pre and post-weaning of afshari sheep were estimated using restricted maximum likelihood (reml) methodology and animal model implemented in dfreml software. the likelihood ratio test (lrt) was used to compare the models. year of birth, age of mo...

Maternal effects can play an important role in a diversity of ecological and evolutionary processes such as population dynamics, phenotypic plasticity, niche construction, life-history evolution and the evolutionary response to selection. However, although maternal effects were defined by quantitative geneticists well over half a century ago, there remains some confusion over exactly what pheno...

Heritable maternal effects have important consequences for the evolutionary dynamics of phenotypic traits under selection, but have only rarely been tested for or quantified in evolutionary studies. Here we estimate maternal effects on early-life traits in a feral population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries) from St Kilda, Scotland. We then partition the maternal effects into genetic and environmental...

Mothers vary in their effects on their offspring, but studies of variation in maternal effects rarely ask whether differences between mothers are consistent for sons and daughters. Here, we analysed maternal effects in the mosquitofish Gambusia holbrooki for development time and adult size of sons and daughters, and a primary male sexual character (gonopodium length). We found substantial mater...

Maternal influence on offspring goes beyond strict nuclear (DNA) inheritance: inherited maternal mRNA, mitochondria, caring and nurturing are all additional sources that affect offspring development, and they can be also shaped by evolution. These additional factors are called maternal effects, and their important role in evolution is well established experimentally. This paper presents two mod...