Ornaments or offspring? Female sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus L.) trade off carotenoids between spines and eggs

Sequencing the genome of threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

Conspicuous Female Ornamentation and Tests of Male Mate Preference in Threespine Sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

Sexual selection drives the evolution of exaggerated male ornaments in many animal species. Female ornamentation is now acknowledged also to be common but is generally less well understood. One example is the recently documented red female throat coloration in some threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) populations. Although female sticklebacks often exhibit a preference for red male t...

Inbreeding in three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus L.): effects on testis and sperm traits

Mating between relatives often results in inbreeding depression, and is assumed to have a strong effect on fitness traits such as fertility and gonad/gamete quality. However, data concerning this topic are contradictory and particularly scarce in fishes. Three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus L.) show inbreeding depression in fertilization and hatching success, survival rates, body s...

Androgen receptor-beta mRNA levels in different tissues in breeding and post-breeding male and female sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus

BACKGROUND Androgens induce male characters by activating androgen receptors (AR). Previous quantitative studies on AR in fishes have been limited to few tissues and/or a single season/reproductive state. The aim of this investigation was to study the possible role of AR-beta expression levels in the control of male traits in the three-spined stickleback. To that end, AR-beta expression levels ...

Effects of experimental Schistocephalus solidus infections on growth, morphology and sexual development of female three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus.

The use of naturally infected hosts in studies attempting to identify parasite-induced changes in host biology is problematical because it does not eliminate the possibility that infection may be a consequence, rather than a cause, of host trait variation. In addition, uncontrolled concomitant infections may confound results. In this study we experimentally infected individual laboratory-bred f...