Together, these determine the four annual life-history processes: somatic and gonadic growth, maturation, reproduction and mortality.
Each year, individuals had the chance to experience the processes of migration to and from saltwater, growth, maturation, reproduction, and mortality (Fig. 1).
Functional loci code for the life-history traits of individuals and thus, together with plastic responses of traits to environmental variation, affect the life-history processes of growth, maturation, reproduction and mortality, which jointly determine population dynamics.
The advantage of this was that the transcriptional profile gained from the analysis of exposed replicated cohorts of worms reared to adult could be linked to measurements of life history traits (growth, maturation, reproduction and mortality) recorded from similarly kept individuals without any influence of the presence of different worm stages in the sample on measured expression pattern.
PMRNs describe the age and size-specific probabilities of reaching sexual maturation, independent of growth and mortality (Heino et al. 2002).
The model includes the entire life cycle, comprising maturation, reproduction and mortality.
The model estimates the rates of maturation and spawning mortality as a continuous function of age for an unfished cohort of females.
Maturation and spawning mortality rates from the model were incorporated into per-recruit models designed to account for the semelparous life history of cephalopods to illustrate the effects of these parameters on biological reference point estimates.
Weight at age, maturation and natural mortality due to other reasons than seal predation were assumed constant in projections because functional relationships describing their variability are unknown [37].
In contrast, PMRNs describe the maturation process after removing effects due to variation in growth rates and mortality, and thus disentangle some, but not all, of the potential environmental effects on maturation (Dieckmann and Heino 2007).
