Embryonic life is particularly sensitive to its surroundings, and the developmental environment can have long-lasting effects on offspring. In oviparous species, the impacts of the developmental environment on offspring traits are mostly examined during development within the egg. However, as more than 25% of the development of squamate reptiles can occur prior to oviposition, we explored the e...

—Latitudinal influences on growing season length and winter severity cause variation in prerecruitment life history across species distributions. We evaluated two recruitment hypotheses for a broadly distributed species, largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides, at the southern extent of their natural range. We tested (1) whether early hatching provided a growth and survival advantage relative to ...

The number of wild quail has dramatically reduced in China and reached a state of endangerment with the deterioration of the environment in recent years. In this study, we examined the ecological behaviors of quails in the cage to determine the differentiation level between wild Japanese quail and domestic quail, to detect the relationship between quail behavior and evolutionary differentiation...

This study deals with the effects of different hatcher temperatures on hatching traits in modern commercial broiler eggs during the last five days of incubation. The hatching eggs were obtained from a 52wk old (Ross 308) flock. All eggs were distributed randomly into one incubator and incubated for 17 d using uniform conditions (37.6 ± 0.5 °C and 58% relative humidity). At the start of 18 days ...

We incubated eggs of Elaphe taeniura at 22, 24, 27, 30 and 32°C to examine the effects of incubation temperature on hatching success, embryonic use of energy and hatchling morphology. Incubation temperature affected incubation length and most hatchling traits examined in this study. Incubation length increased nonlinearly as temperature decreased, with the mean incubation length being 101.7 d a...

For natural populations to adapt to anthropogenic threats, heritable variation must persist in tolerance traits. Silver nanoparticles, the most widely used engineered nanoparticles, are expected to increase in concentrations in freshwaters. Little is known about how these particles affect wild populations, and whether genetic variation persists in tolerance to permit rapid evolutionary response...

Female polymorphism is observed in various animal species, but is particularly common in damselflies. The maintenance of this polymorphism has traditionally been explained from frequency and density dependent sexual conflict, however, the role of abiotic factors has recently attracted more interest. Here, the role of ambient temperature in shaping life-history was investigated for the three fem...

Why is the sex of many reptiles determined by the temperatures that these animals experience during embryogenesis, rather than by their genes? The Charnov-Bull model suggests that temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) can enhance maternal fitness relative to genotypic sex determination (GSD) if offspring traits affect fitness differently for sons versus daughters and nest temperatures e...

The solicitation behaviours performed by dependent young are under selection from the environment created by their parents, as well as wider ecological conditions. Here we show how mechanisms acting before hatching enable canary offspring to adapt their begging behaviour to a variable post-hatching world. Cross-fostering experiments revealed that canary nestling begging intensity is positively ...