Offspring

On questions about offspring survival, the researchers found that students who were given a diagram showing multiple offspring scored 28% to 30% higher than students who had the diagram showing only a single offspring.

Animals with few offspring can devote more resources to the nurturing and protection of each individual offspring, thus reducing the need for many offspring.

Adult males may kill dependent offspring that are not theirs so the female will return to estrus and thus they can sire offspring of their own.

As a result, the offspring reproduced from these eggs would have greater fitness compared to offspring that were reproduced from eggs laid during the day.

Ensuring that enough of a sibling’s offspring survive to adulthood precludes the necessity of the altruistic individual producing offspring.

For instance, a mother may wish to wean her offspring from breastfeeding earlier than does her infant, which frees up the mother to invest in additional offspring.

For others species using TSD, it is exposure to temperatures on both extremes that results in offspring of one sex, and exposure to moderate temperatures that results in offspring of the opposite sex.

For stable transformation the gene should be passed to the offspring in a Mendelian inheritance pattern, so the organism's offspring are also studied.

Lactating females will kill the offspring of a related female both to decrease competition for the female’s offspring and for increased foraging area due to a decrease in territorial defense by the victimized mother.

Males can produce up to 16 offspring over their lifetime, while females average four mating seasons and 12 offspring.

Most prairie dog family groups are made up of one adult breeding male, two to three adult females and one to two male offspring and one to two female offspring.

Other risks to the offspring If the underlying infertility is related to abnormalities in spermatogenesis, it is plausible, but too early to examine that male offspring are at higher risk for sperm abnormalities.

Parental investment theory explains how parents invest more or less in individual offspring based on how successful those offspring are likely to be, and thus how much they might improve the parents' inclusive fitness.

Sperm cells that give rise to female (XX) offspring after fertilization differ in that they carry an X-chromosome, while sperm cells that give rise to male (XY) offspring carry a Y-chromosome.

The benefits of parental investment to the offspring are large and are associated with the effects on condition, growth, survival and ultimately, on reproductive success of the offspring.

The maintenance of sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world is one of the major puzzles in biology given that asexual reproduction can reproduce much more quickly as 50% of offspring are not males, unable to produce offspring themselves.

The mother may both carry genes that contribute to her depression but will also have passed those genes on to her offspring thus increasing the offspring's risk for depression.

Theory may hold that the offspring, by virtue of having a depressed mother in his or her (the offspring's) environment, is at risk for developing depression.

This means that the altruistic individual, by ensuring that the alleles of its close relative are passed on, (through survival of its offspring) can forgo the option of having offspring itself because the same number of alleles are passed on.

This might occur, for example, if a person's parents are nationals of separate countries, and the mother's country claims all offspring of the mother's as their own nationals, but the father's country claims all offspring of the father's.