Dustin J Marshall

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..These findings suggest that when there is variation in egg size, mating order will influence not only the quantity but also the quality of offspring sired by competing males...

..We discuss how such mismatches might alter our understanding and management of marine populations...

..This study shows that, while offspring size is plastic in this species, post-metamorphic factors alone may not determine the size of offspring that mothers produce...

..We suggest that, when there is a minimum and a maximum viable offspring size and the environment is unpredictable, selection will act on both the mean and variance of offspring size...

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..We suggest that interpopulation variation in offspring size can be an adaptive response to local conditions, but the optimal offspring size is surprisingly dynamic...

..We suggest that while electrical blocks to polyspermy evolved in response to excess sperm, permanent blocks to polyspermy could have evolved in response to sperm limitation (insufficient sperm)...

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..The substantial variation in egg sizes observed within broods may represent a bet-hedging strategy by which offspring with variable dispersal potentials are produced...

..Our results suggest that the relationship between offspring size and fitness is highly variable in the marine environment and strongly dependent on the density of conspecifics...

..This technique has the added advantage of making comparisons among species and studies easier without an impractical increase in effort...

..5. Interactions between colonizer phenotype and abundance have important implications for predicting population dynamics beyond those previously provided by numerical abundance or recruit phenotype alone...

..It appears mothers can adaptively adjust offspring size to maximize maternal fitness, altering the offspring phenotype across multiple life-history stages...

..These results demonstrate that larval traits can have multiple, complex fitness consequences that persist across the metamorphic boundary; and thus postmetamorphic selection pressures may constrain the evolution of larval traits...

..We suggest that future studies on maternal effects estimate environmental predictability and present both absolute and relative estimates of maternal fitness within each offspring environment...

..More generally, the often-invoked competitive hierarchies and intransitivities in this system might be usefully revisited using more sophisticated empirical and analytical approaches...

..The deferred costs of dispersal are likely to be crucial for determining how well patterns of dispersal reflect realized connectivity. Ignoring these deferred costs could lead to inaccurate predictions of spatial population dynamics...

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..We suggest that, taken together, larval age and size are important endogenous factors that act to affect pre-settlement larval behavior and that changes in behavior may act to increase fitness...

..Hence, future studies should examine maternal effects on both the mean and the variance of offspring traits...

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..Our results show that differences in genetic diversity among populations can have pervasive effects on population productivity within remarkably short periods of time...

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..Overall, our results suggest that sperm competition does not represent a strong force maintaining anisogamy in broadcast spawners. Instead, sperm limitation seems to select for large eggs and smaller, more numerous sperm...

..These results suggest that marine organisms use different genetic mechanisms to adapt to different levels of pollution and that the level of genetic variation to adapt to intense pollution stresses may be limited...

..Nevertheless, our results caution against interpreting elevated hatching success as an indirect genetic benefit of polyandry when variance in fertilization is not controlled...

..This conflict could result in a coevolutionary race that may have led to the evolution of internal fertilization in marine organisms...

..Our results show that when siblings are likely to interact, genetic variation among individuals can decrease competition for resources and generate substantial fitness benefits within a single generation...

..Uniquely, this model predicts the absolute value of B, emphasizes that there is no single scaling exponent of B, and demonstrates that a single model can explain the variation in B seen in nature...

..Disentangling indirect, genetic benefits from genetic diversity effects is challenging but crucial if we are to understand the selection pressures acting to promote polyandry...

..Overall, variability in the form and strength of selection on offspring size in nature may reduce the efficacy of selection on offspring size and maintain variation in this trait...

..Links between sperm phenotype and offspring performance may constrain responses to selection on either sperm or offspring traits, with broad ecological and evolutionary implications...

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..Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of male x female interactions at fertilization and suggest that polyandry will enable females to reduce the cost of fertilization by incompatible gametes...

..Given that the age of settling larvae is likely to be variable in the field, such age specific variation in settlement response of larvae may have important consequences for host-epibiont interactions in natural communities...