Medial temporal lobe structures including the hippocampus are implicated by separate investigations in both episodic memory and spatial function. We show that a single recurrent attractor network can store both the discrete memories that characterize ...

Secondary sexual characteristics may indicate quality of the immune system and therefore a preference for masculinity may confer genetic benefits to offspring; however, high masculinity may be associated with costs of decreased paternal investment. ...

Before predictable periods of high nutritional demand and little or no intake, vertebrates store fuel mainly composed of energy–dense lipids or energy–poor but protein–rich muscle tissue. Documenting contrasts in fuel composition and storage patterns ...

Recent experiments have demonstrated the importance of numerical assessment in animal contests. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to model explicitly the relationship between the relative number of combatants on each side and the costs and ...

The interaction between natural and sexual selection is central to many theories of how mate choice and reproductive isolation evolve, but their joint effect on the evolution of mate recognition has not, to my knowledge, been investigated in an ...

Carotenoid pigments are a widespread source of ornamental coloration in vertebrates and expression of carotenoid–based colour displays has been shown to serve as an important criterion in female mate choice in birds and fishes. Unlike other ...

Sperm morphology evolves rapidly, resulting in an exceptional diversity of sperm size and shape across animal phyla. This swift evolution has been thought to prevent fertilizations between closely related species. Alternatively, recent correlative ...

Survival and reproduction are key features in the evolution of life–history strategies. In this study, we use capture–mark–resighting and multi–state models to examine survival senescence and reproductive senescence in six successive cohorts of fallow ...

Since the mid–1980s the zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, Pallas 1771, has become the protagonist of a spectacular freshwater invasion in North America due to its large economic and biological impact. Several genetic studies on American populations ...

Emergence from an aquatic environment to the land is one of the major evolutionary transitions within the arthropods. It is often considered that the first hexapods, and in particular the first springtails, were semi–aquatic and this assumption drives ...

In recent decades, female red-cockaded woodpeckers (Picoides borealis) have laid eggs increasingly earlier in response to a changing climate, as has been observed in several other bird species breeding at north temperate latitudes. Within each year, ...

We used the nuclear polyhedrosis virus of the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar, to investigate whether the timing of transmission influences the evolution of virulence. In theory, early transmission should favour rapid replication and increase virulence, ...

Hybrid sterility is thought to be due to deleterious epistatic interactions between genes from different species. Here we demonstrate that dominant genic incompatibility does not contribute to sterility in hybrids between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and ...

The amount of land available for the coexistent growing of both organic and genetically modified herbicide-tolerant (GMHT) crops depends on the separation distance between the two types of crop. The form of the decline in the proportion of land ...

The evolution of selfing in hermaphrodites has been studied to reveal the demographic conditions that lead to intermediate selfing rates. Using a demographic model based on Ricker–type density regulation, we assume first that, independent of ...

Dioecious plants (with separate male and female individuals) more often have drab, inconspicuous flowers than related bisexual plants. Models indicate, however, that similar conditions favour the evolution of showy floral displays in dioecious and ...