Browsing Biological Sciences by Issue Date
Now showing items 1-20 of 128
Micro- and Macroevolutionary Trade-Offs in Plant-Feeding Insects
(2023-05-17)
A long-standing hypothesis asserts that plant-feeding insects specialize on particular host plants because of negative interactions (trade-offs) between adaptations to alternative hosts, yet empirical evidence for such ...
Reproductive Value and the Stochastic Demography of Age-Structured Populations
(2022-09-15)
The dynamics of an age-structured population in a fluctuating environment is determined by the stochastic individual contributions from annual survival and fecundity to the total reproductive value of the population the ...
Propagule size and sex ratio influence colonisation dynamics after introduction of a non-native lizard
(2022-01-28)
1. The composition of founding populations plays an important role in colonisation dynamics and can influence population growth during early stages of biological invasion. Specifically, founding populations with small ...
Multiple Colonizations Lead to Cryptic Biodiversity in an Island Ecosystem: Comparative Phylogeography of Anchialine Shrimp Species in the Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan
(2022-03-04)
Archipelagos of the Indo-West Pacific are considered to be among the richest in the world in biodiversity,
and phylogeographic studies generally support either the
center of origin or the center of accumulation hypothesis ...
Life History Aspects of Exyra semicrocea (Pitcher Plant Moth) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)
(2022-03-03)
With as little as 3% of southeastern Coastal Plain pitcher plant bogs remaining, it is important to understand the life-history aspects of the endemic organisms that
comprise this community. In this study, we elucidate ...
Embryo development and global change: how do reptile embryos respond to ecologically relevant thermal stress?
(2019-09-15)
Two components of global change, climate change and urbanization, contribute to increased ambient temperatures that cause heat stress or mortality in animals. Many animals can respond to harmful temperatures behaviorally; ...
Geographic structure in the Southern Ocean circumpolar brittle star Ophionotus victoriae (Ophiuridae) revealed from mtDNA and single-nucleotide polymorphism data
(2019-04-29)
Marine systems have traditionally been thought of as "open" with few barriers to gene flow. In particular, many marine organisms in the Southern Ocean purportedly possess circumpolar distributions that have rarely been ...
A test of reproductive power in snakes
(2022-12-06)
Reproductive power is a contentious concept among ecologists, and the model has been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds. Despite these criticisms, the model has successfully predicted the modal (optimal) size ...
Tracking transmission of apicomplexan symbionts in diverse Caribbean corals
(2019-05-10)
Symbionts in each generation are transmitted to new host individuals either vertically (parent to offspring), horizontally (from exogenous sources), or a combination of both. Scleractinian corals make an excellent study ...
Lizard embryos prioritize post-hatching energy reserves over increased hatchling body size during development
(2019-09-09)
Embryonic development in oviparous organisms is fueled by maternally-allocated yolk, with many organisms hatching before that energy store is completely used up; the resultant leftover (residual) yolk is internalized and ...
Hemichordate Molecular Phylogeny Reveals a Novel Cold-Water Clade of Harrimaniid Acorn Worms
(2022-03-04)
Hemichordates are instrumental to understanding early deuterostome and chordate evolution, yet diversity and relationships within the group have been understudied. Recently, there has been renewed interest in hemichordate ...
The Vitamin A-Redox Hypothesis: A Biochemical Basis for Honest Signaling via Carotenoid Pigmentation
(2022-07-29)
Trade-offs in resource allocation have been widely stated as the means by which the honesty of ornamental traits is maintained, but an alternative to this resource trade-off hypothesis is that production of ornamentation ...
Crossing the Divide: Admixture Across the Antarctic Polar Front Revealed by the Brittle Star Astrotoma agassizii
(2019-07-31)
The Antarctic Polar Front (APF) is one of the most well-defined and persistent oceanographic features on the planet and serves as a barrier to dispersal between the Southern Ocean and lower latitudes. High levels of endemism ...
Thermal Spikes Caused by the Urban Heat Island Effect Result in Differential Egg Survival of a Non-native Lizard (Anolis cristatellus)
(2019-09-15)
Embryonic development in ectotherms is very sensitive to abiotic nest conditions. In reptiles, high incubation temperatures often result in relatively short incubation periods and large hatching size, but extremely high ...
Landscape-level influences of terrestrial snake occupancy within the southeastern United States
(2020-04-02)
Habitat loss and degradation are thought to be the primary drivers of species
extirpations, but for many species we have little information regarding specific habitats that
influence occupancy. Snakes are of conservation ...