This book is devoted to understanding the distribution of sexual systems (simultaneous hermaphroditism, sequential hermaphroditism, environmental sex determination, dioecy, androdioecy, etc.) among taxa which remains a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Although great progress has been made for angiosperms, there is not yet a theory that predicts the sexual system for the majority of animal taxa and also other taxa of plants remain poorly understood.
The problem, particularly for animals is that sexual systems may be very conservative, with whole phyla and classes being characterized by a single sexual system; for example essentially the whole phylum Platyhelminthes is simultaneously hermaphroditic whereas the Insecta (Hexapoda) and the Tetrapoda among the vertebrates, are exclusively dioecious. Sex allocation theory on the other hand, suggests that sexual system should be very responsive to evolution, changing with population density, life span, patterns of resource availability, etc. This book provides an overviews of the topic and then presents a series of chapters each dealing with a taxon with substantial lability in sexual system to attempt to identify the factors associated with changes in sexual system in each case. By this approach the authors discover factors that have not been considered in formal theory but seem to have a major impact on transitions between sexual systems.This book will appeal to a wide readership, from zoology through evolutionary biology to botany.
- ISBN: 978-3-319-94137-0
- Editorial: Springer
- Encuadernacion: Cartoné
- Páginas: 230
- Fecha Publicación: 05/11/2018
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés