Historical geological events and climatic changes are believed to have played important roles in shaping the current distribution of species. However, sympatric species may have responded in different ways to such climatic fluctuations. Here we compared genetic structures of two corvid species, the Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus and the Eurasian Magpie Pica pica, both widespread but with ...

Life history theory studies the evolution of traits related to reproductive fitness. Fertility and parental investment are key life history traits which, from an evolutionary standpoint, appear strongly interrelated. The aim of this work was to analyze the genetic and environmental structure and relationship of two behaviors associated with reproductive fitness: total number of offspring and me...

BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to evaluate the factor structure of the newly developed Adult Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (AEBQ) (Hunot et al., Appetite 105:356-63, 2016) in an Australian sample, and examine associations between the four food approach and four food avoidance appetitive traits with body mass index (BMI). METHODS Participants (N = 998) recruited between May and Octobe...

In Japan, asbestos was finally treated as a social issue in 2006, and a pleuropneumonectomy has been recently recognized as one of the effective treatments for malignant pleural mesothelioma. A pleuropneumonectomy for this disease was first performed by Wörn in 1974, followed by other reports made by Butchart et al., Rusch et al., and Sugarbaker et al. These reports include many problems, such ...

The bee-eaters (family Meropidae) comprise a group of brightly colored, but morphologically homogeneous, birds with a wide variety of life history characteristics. A phylogeny of bee-eaters was reconstructed using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequence data from 23 of the 25 named bee-eater species. Analysis of the combined data set provided a well-supported phylogenetic hypothesis for the fami...

The wealth of literature indicating that men are more physically aggressive than women may be the reason for the dearth of research on physical aggression in women. However, recent research has found that this discrepancy is better attributed to conformity to gender roles rather than to biological sex. The purpose of the present study was to assess the influence of masculine and feminine gender...

In the current context of climate change and landscape fragmentation, efficient conservation strategies require the explicit consideration of life history traits. This is particularly true for amphibians, which are highly threatened worldwide, composed by more than 7400 species, which is constitute one of the most species-rich vertebrate groups. The collection of information on life history tra...

We have identified, using composite interval mapping, quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting a variety of life history traits (LHTs) in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Using recombinant inbred strains assayed on the surface of agar plates, we found QTL for survival, early fertility, age of onset of sexual maturity, and population growth rate. There was no overall correlation between survi...

The repeated evolution of C4 photosynthesis in independent lineages has resulted in distinct biogeographical distributions in different phylogenetic lineages and the variants of C4 photosynthesis. However, most previous studies have only considered C3/C4 differences without considering phylogeny, C4 subtype, or habitat characteristics. We hypothesized that independent lineages of C4 grasses hav...