Seasonal control of reproduction is critical for the perpetuation of species living in temperate zones that display major changes in climatic environment and availability of food resources. In mammals, seasonal cues are mainly provided by the annual change in the 24-h light/dark ratio (i.e., photoperiod), which is translated into the nocturnal production of the pineal hormone melatonin. The ann...

The assumption that natural selection is an Optlmlslllg process, means that reproductive seasonality in mammals evolved to maximise gene survival. Although the constraints usually imposed on optimality theory are applicable, it can be assumed that periodicity in reproduction represents an adaptation to fluctuation in the availability of potentially limiting resources. In areas where these fluct...

Antarctic krill is thought to undergo an annual cycle of biological processes to cope with seasonal changes in their environment. The question of whether, and to what degree, seasonal environmental parameters such as photoperiod, food availability and temperature govern metabolism in krill is not clear. In this long-term laboratory study, respiration rates were determined in krill incubated und...

The seasonal mean of a climate variable is affected by processes with timescales from less than seasonal to interannual or longer. In this paper, the seasonal mean is conceptualised as consisting of intraseasonal and slowly varying (longer than a season) components. The slow component of the seasonal mean is related to slowly varying internal and external processes which are potentially predict...

Billions of birds undertake long-distance migration and the complexity schedules has only recently become clear. Such movements occur as a response to seasonality but ultimate drivers these changing distributions remain difficult study directly. Modeling seasonal based fundamentally on climate vegetation without parameterizing with empirical data, we focus potential role ambient temperature ava...