Date of Award
1-1-2009
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Department
Biological Sciences
First Advisor
Timothy A. Mousseau
Abstract
All organisms experience some stress during development, and have mechanisms for countering the effects of stress. The mechanisms are costly, and if the stress is great enough, force trade-offs with other life history characters. These trade-offs may result in divergences from the optimal phenotype seen in unstressed individuals. Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies derived from populations collected near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant where they had been chronically exposed to low-level ionizing radiation for generations, and flies exposed to ionizing radiation in the laboratory, showed some disturbances in their recombination rates, their gonadal development, and their developmental stability as measured by fluctuating asymmetry. The theoretical implications of this and other stresses and selection pressures that may be operating in Drosophila melanogaster and other taxa are discussed.
Rights
© 2009, Brent Alan Fuller
Recommended Citation
Fuller, B. A.(2009). On the Effects of Stress, Resistance to Stress, and Developmental Stability On Life History Characters In Drosophila Melanogaster. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/31