Drosophila melanogaster females are highly selective about the chemosensory quality of their egg-laying sites, an important trait that promotes the survival and fitness of their offspring. How egg-laying females respond to UV light is not known, however. UV is a well-documented phototactic cue for adult Drosophila, but it is an aversive cue for larvae. Here, we show that female flies exhibit UV...

A specific sperm-egg interaction in the oviductal matrix is crucial for internal fertilization of the red-bellied newt, Cynops pyrrhogaster. An understanding of the molecular basis of this interaction is expected to elucidate the evolutionary history of internal fertilization in amphibians. Recently, deep sequencing technology has provided global gene information even in nonmodel animals, allow...

The furnished cage is a new housing system for layers. A current trend in furnished cage design is to increase group size and replace the litter box with a mat provided with litter. An experiment was set up to determine the effects of group size and litter provision on laying performance and egg quality of beak-trimmed ISA Brown hens housed in large furnished cages with more than 12 hens. Six t...

The objective of this study was to compare fattening performance, carcass traits, and egg quality of Japanese quails with different feather colors (white, dark brown, golden, and wild-type). In the study, 360 one-day-old quail chicks with 4 different feather colors were used as animal material. Quails were fed ad libitum for 42 days to determine fattening performance and carcass traits. To dete...

Obligate brood parasitic birds lay their eggs in nests of other species and parasite eggs typically have evolved greater structural strength relative to host eggs. Increased mechanical strength of the parasite eggshell is an adaptation that can interfere with puncture ejection behaviours of discriminating hosts. We investigated whether hardness of eggshells is related to differences between phy...

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 ...

Internal fertilization ensures successful reproduction of tetrapod vertebrates on land, although how this mode of reproduction evolved is unknown. Here, we identified a novel gene encoding sperm motility-initiating substance (SMIS), a key protein for the internal fertilization of the urodele Cynops pyrrhogaster by Edman degradation of an isolated protein and subsequent reverse transcription pol...

this study was conducted to investigate direct and maternal effects on some economic traits in north iranian native fowls. traits considered were body weight at 1 day of age (bw1), body weight at 8 weeks of age (bw8), body weight at 12 weeks of age (bw12), egg number (en) during the first 12 weeks of laying period, egg weight at 1st day of laying (ew1), mean egg weight at 28th, 30th and 32nd we...

In this study, it was aimed to determine the internal and external quality traits of the Guinea fowl eggs as well as the phenotypic correlation among the these traits. Totally 100 Guinea fowl eggs were collected in three sequential days were used for this study. The birds were housed at Poultry Research Unit of the Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Akdeniz. Val...