Open AccessUnhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations
Author(s) -
Nicola Hemmings,
Simon Evans
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
biology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.596
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1744-957X
pISSN - 1744-9561
DOI - 10.1098/rsbl.2019.0763
Subject(s) - biology , human fertilization , hatching , zygote , evolutionary biology , population , selection (genetic algorithm) , natural selection , confounding , fraction (chemistry) , zoology , ecology , genetics , demography , embryo , statistics , artificial intelligence , mathematics , sociology , computer science , embryogenesis , chemistry , organic chemistry
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 overwhelming majorities (99.9%) of laid eggs were fertilized. These systems thus present opportunities to eliminate the invisible fraction from life-history data.