The egg mortality (EM) depends on the rice developmental stage and is greatest at the maximum tillering stage.
Wet and windy weather disrupts breeding, with butterflies sometimes dying before they can reproduce, greater incidents of egg mortality and susceptibility to pathogens, especially fungi.
In general, egg mortality was very low with some tanks containing disinfected females with no apparent egg mortality.
For each wetland, the maximum egg mass count was recorded.
Egg mortality was mainly due to flooding (7.35%), predation (11.03%) and conflict with farmers (8.09%).
In daily egg production methods (DEPMs) of estimating pelagic fish stock biomass, high variance in measured egg mortality rate is the principal source of error.
The results suggest that the mortality in the early life stages (egg and larvae) plays an important role in population dynamics, either by initial egg mortality, larvae dispersion, settlement failure or shrimp predation.
Three-day-old female E. nassaui have reached their maximum egg complement so are not limited by egg maturation (Murray 2010).
Overall, rates of parasitism and predation in experimental plots were low, accounting for only 3.8%and4.4%4% of egg mortality, respectively.
A simple analytic equation was used to test the sensitivity of biomass estimates to daily egg mortality.
