the present  study  was carried out to investigate the polymorphism of intron 3 to exon 3 of prolactin gene containing 24 bpindel at nucleotide position (np)  358 and its association with some reproductive traits in japanese quail. these traits consisted of weight (wsm) and age at sexual maturity (asm), mean egg weight at 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 2-6th weeks (mew), and the number of eggs during the 2...

This paper proposes the generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH), which suggests that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment will have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases female reproductive success at a gre...

OBJECTIVE This study estimated the genetic parameters for productive and reproductive traits. METHODS The data included production and reproduction records of animals that have calved between 1979 and 2013. The genetic parameters were estimated using multivariate mixed models (DMU) package, fitting univariate and multivariate mixed models with average information restricted maximum likelihood...

Maternally inherited endosymbionts have been implicated as significant drivers of sexual conflict within their hosts, typically through sex-ratio manipulation. Empirical studies show that some of these endosymbionts have the potential to influence sexual conflict not by sex-ratio distortion, but by altering reproductive traits within their hosts. Research has already shown that reproductive tra...

Sexual selection is proposed to be an important driver of diversification in animal systems, yet previous tests of this hypothesis have produced mixed results and the mechanisms involved remain unclear. Here, we use a novel phylogenetic approach to assess the influence of sexual selection on patterns of evolutionary change during 84 recent speciation events across 23 passerine bird families. We...

Learning is widespread in nature, occurring in most animal taxa and in several different ecological contexts and, thus, might play a key role in evolutionary processes. Here, we review the accumulating empirical evidence for the involvement of learning in mate choice and the consequences for sexual selection and reproductive isolation. We distinguish two broad categories: learned mate preferenc...

Behavioral isolation in animals can be mediated by inherent mating preferences and assortative traits, such as divergence in the diel timing of mating activity. Although divergence in the diel mating time could, in principle, promote the reproductive isolation of sympatric, conspecific populations, there is currently no unequivocal evidence of this. We conducted different mate-choice experiment...

Aim The global vertical depth distribution of seagrass species remains poorly understood. Locally, the abundance and seagrasses is determined by light penetration, but at levels each has very distinct maximum distributional ranges, indicating that plant-associated traits must also influence their specific ranges. Seagrass-specific attributes, such as plant size or architecture, growth reproduct...

The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis (gTWH) [Kanazawa, S., 2005a. Big and tall parents have more sons; further generalizations of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. J. Theor. Biol. 235, 583-590] proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment have a higher-than-expect...