Plasma mammalian leptin analogue predicts reproductive phenology, but not reproductive output in a capital-income breeding seaduck.

To invest in energetically demanding life history stages, individuals require a substantial amount of resources. Physiological traits, particularly those related to energetics, can be useful for examining variation in life history decisions and trade-offs because they result from individual responses to environmental variation. Leptin is a protein hormone found in mammals that is proportional to the amount of endogenous fat stores within an individual.

Insect herbivory on seedlings of rainforest trees: Effects of density and distance of conspecific and heterospecific neighbors.

Natural enemies of plants such as insect herbivores can contribute to structuring and maintaining plant diversity in tropical forests. Most research in this area has focused on the role of specialized enemies and the extent to which herbivory on individual plant species is density-dependent. Relatively few insect herbivores specialize on a single host plant species.