Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Hemmings N
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7013486 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations.
Hemmings Nicola N Evans Simon S
Biology letters 20200108 1
Prenatal mortality is typically overlooked in population studies, which biases evolutionary inference by confounding selection and inheritance. Birds represent an opportunity to include this 'invisible fraction' if each egg contains a zygote, but whether hatching failure is caused by fertilization failure versus prenatal mortality is largely unknown. We quantified fertilization failure rates in two bird species that are popular systems for studying evolutionary dynamics and found that overwhelmi ...[more]
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