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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Coevolution Of Hosts And Pathogens In The Presence Of Multiple Types Of Hosts, Evan J. Mitchell
Coevolution Of Hosts And Pathogens In The Presence Of Multiple Types Of Hosts, Evan J. Mitchell
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
How will hosts and pathogens coevolve in response to multiple types of hosts? I study this question from three different perspectives. First, I model a scenario in which hosts are categorized as female or male. Hosts invest resources in maintaining their immune system at a cost to their reproductive success, while pathogens face a trade-off between transmission and duration of infection. Importantly, female hosts are also able to vertically transmit an infection to their newborn offspring. The main result is that as the rate of vertical transmission increases, female hosts will have a greater incentive to pay the cost to …
Effects Of Gene-Environment Interactions On The Evolution Of Social Behaviours, Vonica J. Flear
Effects Of Gene-Environment Interactions On The Evolution Of Social Behaviours, Vonica J. Flear
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Inclusive fitness models in sociobiology emphasize the importance of relatedness, R, and synergy, S when exploring the evolution of social behaviours. Very few models explicitly consider ‘role’, or environmental stimuli, influencing the expression of behaviours, and none consider genetic-environment interactions where genotype predisposes individuals to certain roles. I propose a third key variable for inclusive fitness models, Q, which describes the overlooked potential bias in the genetic composition of individuals exposed to an environmental stimulus – here referred to as ‘role’. I describe a model built from Price’s formula which can be presented in a ‘Hamilton’s Rule’ format. …
The Evolution Of Kin Recognition, Timothy Ja Hain
The Evolution Of Kin Recognition, Timothy Ja Hain
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The discovery that many animals are promiscuous has challenged the importance of Hamilton’s Rule because it reduces the net benefits of helping nestmates. To resolve this challenge, biologists have investigated animals’ abilities to determine degrees of relatedness among individuals using kin recognition mechanisms. I conducted a literature review and found that most animals use one of two mechanisms: “familiarity” whereby kin are remembered from interactions early in life, such as in a nest, or “phenotype matching” whereby putative kin are compared to a template of what kin should look, smell, or sound like based on relatives encountered during early life …