First, these methods measured different parameters; some methods used demographic parameters [ 6] to assess variance in allele frequencies and increase in inbreeding, i.e. number of reproducers for N es and variance of their progeny size for N ev, whereas other methods used coancestry or inbreeding rate to measure the evolution of IBD probability directly.
Individuals in parthenogenetic and gynogenetic taxa have high H (because such unisexual vertebrate species invariably had hybrid evolutionary origins), but polyembryonic individuals exhibit H values that are typical for sexual reproducers, and individuals that emerge from constitutive selfing are highly homozygous.
The number of mates and clutches did not significantly differ from a Poisson distribution for successful reproducers, but did differ significantly when considering all individuals.
For successful reproducers in our study population we observed a sex ratio of 0.9 males per female and the standardized variances in mate acquisition and clutch production, as well as the Bateman gradients, did not differ significantly between the sexes (Table 1, Fig. 5), indicating similar mating patterns for successful males and females.
For Griesemer, thinking in terms of reproducers incorporates development into heredity and the evolutionary process.
The seemingly massive discrepancy of the absence or existence of development can be tackled somewhat differently, demonstrating that developing reproducers (for example, organisms) are not so very different from replicators.
Several methods of varying complexity have been proposed to minimise kinship [ 6], or to maximise breeding values for a predefined inbreeding rate [ 17], or to minimise average kinship for a desired average EBV [ 18], usually by optimising the contribution of reproducers.
Griesemer's classification of reproducers is an abstraction hierarchy.
It provides a formal taxonomy of reproducers, arranging them in a series of nested classes.
The notion of reproducers has also been applied to speciation and cladogenesis (Hamilton and Haber 2006).
