The life cycle of land plants involves cycling between two multicellular phases, the haploid gametophyte and the diploid sporophtye. Asexual reproductive strategies, that bypass meiosis and fertilization, have evolved in many plants representing diverse taxa among the land plant phylogeny. Apogamy is an asexual reproductive strategy that produces a sporophyte directly from a gametophyte cell wi...

There are four genetically distinct components in the developing seeds of flowering plants: maternal sporophyte, gametophyte, endosperm, and embryo. Each component can potentially influence the quantity or quality of nutrients provided to the embryo of its seed, thereby reducing the amount available to embryos in other seeds of that plant. The theory of kin selection predicts that each componen...

Many organisms occurring in temporally variable environments have evolved life-history traits that enable their populations to persist during unfavorable environmental conditions. Numerous terrestrial plants, insects, and marine invertebrates, for example, rely on resting stages that disperse their propagules in time. Although widely observed among many taxa, few examples exist for marine macro...