Competitive interactions among siblings are an important determinant of parental fitness. These are strongly influenced by relative offspring size and therefore also by the extent to which parents can influence offspring size hierarchies. The temporal pattern of hatching in an avian clutch has a...

The role of developmental conditions in shaping adult phenotypes has been the focus of a great deal of recent work. However, the effects of early life stress on reproductive performance have been little studied, particularly in avian species. In addition, although there is a large body of...

Identifying markers that are indicative of individual state, related to fitness, and which could be used to study life-history trade-offs in wild populations is extremely difficult. Recently, it has been suggested that telomeres, the ends of eukaryote chromosomes, might be useful in this...

Antipredatory vigilance usually decreases in groups. The generally accepted "collective detection" explanation implies that because there are more eyes to scan the surroundings for predators, individuals in a group can lower their personal investment in vigilance without increasing their...

Antipredatory benefits are generally considered important in the evolution and maintenance of animal aggregations. One such benefit is the confusion effect: the reduced ease of prey capture experienced by some predators resulting from an inability to single out and attack an individual prey from...

How insect defense chemicals have evolved has remained relatively understudied, compared with the evolution of aposematic signals of such defenses. Because there is mounting evidence that chemical defenses can generally be expected to be costly, understanding the evolution of such defenses and...

Nestling brood parasites vary in the harm that they do to their companions in the nest. Here we use a game-theoretical model to attempt to account for this variation. Our model considers hosts that might routinely abandon single nestlings, regardless of whether they are host young or brood...

Although numerous influential models in ecology assume a directly proportional relationship between prey density and prey encounter rate, a recent test of this assumption found that the actual relationship was nonlinear (rising slower than proportionately). Here, three-spined sticklebacks were...