The combined effects of greater quantity and quality of litter indicate tropical cyclones exert a widespread and long-term influence on subsequent ecosystem processes.
Housing the three Cbx3 hypo / hypo males with wild-type females resulted in no litters, indicating a possible problem with male fertility.
Mice homozygous for this allele did not show lethality until embryonic day (E) 17.5 (supplementary material Fig. S2A), but postnatally we identified only three live pups from over 20 litters, indicating that homozygotes died perinatally.
The distribution of genotypes in these litters indicate the overall ratio of homozygous D2, heterozygous and homozygous mutant alleles were not significantly different from the expected Hardy-Weinberg ratio (Chi-squared test P = 0.94).
A small proportion of Cr accumulated in biomass (4.7 8.6%) was released during plant litter decomposition, indicating that the effect of litter decomposition on water quality was negligible.
At the same time, however, results from the current study have shown that oocytes from PtenloxP/loxP; Zp3-Cre+ mice undergo normal maturation, ovulation, and fertilization, and the mutant mice were completely fertile with normal litter sizes, indicating that the loss of Pten in oocytes does not apparently affect the fertility of the mice.
However, the stillbirth rate increased over time within each litter size, indicating that gradual changes over time in other, yet unidentified, factors operating at the population level apparently have contributed to the overall increased stillbirth rate.
We found positive correlations between asymptotic food intake and litter mass, indicating that increased food intake was largely allocated to milk production and hence pup growth in both warm and cold mice.
The feeding experiment showed that the earthworms in units containing soil and some form of organic matter (litter and/or fragmented litter) produced many cocoons, indicating that litter and fragmented litter are important food resources for them.
This result was expected since the low heritability of litter size indicates that the variation in litter size was mainly due to environmental factors; removing the effect of litter size on birth size should therefore decrease the amount of environmental variation in birth size.
