We found that among both men and women born into landless families (i.e., with low access to resources), marital prospects, probability of reproduction, and offspring viability were all positively

related to local crop yield during the birth year. Such effects were generally absent among those born into landowning families. Among landless individuals born when yields of the two main crops, rye and barley, were both below median, only 50% of adult males and 55% of adult females gained any reproductive success in their lifetime, whereas 97% and 95% of those born when both yields were above the median did so. Our results suggest that maternal investment in offspring in prenatal or early postnatal life this website may have profound

implications for the evolutionary fitness of human offspring, particularly among those for which resources are more limiting. Our study adds support to the idea that early nutrition can limit reproductive success in natural animal populations, Adriamycin and provides the most direct evidence to date that this process applies to humans.”
“P>1. Metrics have become a standard way for summarizing environmental monitoring results. Different metrics react differently to natural variations and human-induced stressors. We suggest that combined analysis of time trends in selected biological metrics allows identification of biological processes (e.g. individual growth, mortality or recruitment) that have changed (increased or decreased) persistently. Alternatively, time trends in the abundance of sensitive species could indicate changes in environmental stressors.\n\n2. We calculate the joint likelihood of time trends in three metrics and use it to evaluate the evidence in the data for different combinations of metric time trends. A simulation study provides guidelines for interpreting log-likelihood differences.\n\n3. We illustrate the approach for identifying biological process changes for three North Sea fish stocks (cod Gadus

morhua, DMXAA cell line lesser-spotted dogfish Scyliorhinus canicula and whiting Merlangius merlangius) using metrics derived from international bottom-trawl survey data for the period 1997-2008. Over the period, a decrease in recruitment and several simultaneous process changes were most likely for cod, while a recruitment increase, mortality decrease and several process changes were most likely for lesser-spotted dogfish. No significant persistent process changes were found for whiting.\n\n4. Synthesis and applications. The likelihood approach offers a way of combining monotonic time trends in multiple metrics for identifying persistent changes in exploited populations or environmental stressors, given suitable metric time series and tables for interpreting joint time trends. For data rich fish populations, the proposed method can supplement analytical stock assessments.