Testing population differentiation in plant species - how important are environmental maternal effects

Adaptive maternal effects and rapid population differentiation

How rapidly can two populations diverge when exposed to different selection pressures? And what mechanisms contribute to rapid population divergence? A remarkable new study by Badyaev et al. of house finches Carpodacus mexicanus suggests that simultaneous maternal adjustment of offspring sex ratio and growth rates has played an important role in rapid population differentiation associated with ...

Food Taxes: How Likely Are Likely Effects?

Interactions between demography and environmental effects are important determinants of population dynamics

Climate change will affect the population dynamics of many species, yet the consequences for the long-term persistence of populations are poorly understood. A major reason for this is that density-dependent feedback effects caused by fluctuations in population size are considered independent of stochastic variation in the environment. We show that an interplay between winter temperature and pop...

How effective are maternal effects at having effects?

The well studied trade-off between offspring size and offspring number assumes that offspring fitness increases with increasing per-offspring investment. Where mothers differ genetically or exhibit plastic variation in reproductive effort, there can be variation in per capita investment in offspring, and via this trade-off, variation in fecundity. Variation in per capita investment will affect ...

How important are conidial appendages?

The genus The genus Dinemasporium is used as a case study to evaluate the importance of conidial appendages for generic level classification of coelomycetous fungi. Based on morphology and sequence data of the large subunit nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (LSU, 28S) and the internal transcribed spacers and 5.8S rRNA gene of the nrDNA operon, the genus Dinemasporium is circumscribed, and an epitype d...