Birds can influence the embryonic development through incubation behaviour because avian embryos develop using parent’s body heat. Although previous studies assumed that incubation behaviour influences hatching patterns, few studies have studied the effect of incubation behaviou…
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Animals may adopt a range of energy strategies to persist and perhaps prosper under various prevailing environmental conditions. For example, they may achieve similar growth by investing heavily in maintaining a high capacity food capture and processing system or by using a lowe…
Individuals have limited time and energy and so they face a trade-off between the resources they allocate to parental, mating and self-maintenance activities and between care of current and future offspring. Within a biparental system, models predict that an individual will do b…
Leishmania resides inside mammalian macrophages, from where it is thought to manipulate the host immune system by releasing virulence factors. The cysteine peptidase CPB has been shown to be secreted by the parasite and act as such a virulence factor. CPB is released through the…
Conservation of phenotypically variable taxa such as the European whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) can be particularly challenging. In this thesis it is argued that the recent designation of seven native C. lavaretus populations as three endemic species (C. clupeoides, C. stigmat…
There is now strong epidemiological and animal research showing that undernutrition in gestation and early postnatal life is linked with a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease in adulthood. The physiological processes involved are not yet clear. The aim of this thesis was …
Coronella austriaca is the United Kingdom’s rarest snake, being confined to the lowland heathlands of Dorset, Hampshire and Surrey. As a result, it remains the least understood; despite being listed as a key biodiversity action plan species. Substantial loss and fragmentation of…
Invertebrates are the primary component in the diet of northern bobwhite, Colinus virginianus, chicks during the first two weeks of life. Despite this, few studies have described the composition of invertebrates in the diet of wild chicks and none have examined their effects on …
Ecologists would like to understand how complexity persists in nature. In this thesis I have taken two fundamentally different routes to study ecosystem stability of model ecosystems: classical community ecology and classical population ecology. In community ecology models, we c…
This study constructed phylogenies for the Nectariniidae from up to 20 parameters derived from quantitative analyses of their vocalisations and used these to test hypotheses on whether or not the origin of sunbirds is African or Asian. In addition to standard sonographic measure…