No Intra-Locus Sexual Conflict over Reproductive Fitness or Ageing in Field Crickets

Differences in the ways in which males and females maximize evolutionary fitness can lead to intra-locus sexual conflict in which genes delivering fitness benefits to one sex are costly when expressed in the other. Trade-offs between current reproductive effort and future reproduction and survival are fundamental to the evolutionary biology of ageing. This leads to the prediction that sex differences in the optimization of age-dependent reproductive effort may generate intra-locus sexual conflict over ageing rates. Here we test for intra-locus sexual conflict over age-dependent reproductive effort and longevity in the black field cricket, Teleogryllus commodus. Using a half-sib breeding design, we show that the most important components of male and female reproductive effort (male calling effort and the number of eggs laid by females) were positively genetically correlated, especially in early adulthood. However, the genetic relationships between longevity and reproductive effort were different for males and females, leading to low genetic covariation between male and female longevity. The apparent absence of intra-locus sexual conflict over ageing suggests that male and female longevity can evolve largely independently of one another

Observation of multiple mechanisms for stimulating ion waves in ignition scale plasmas. Revision 1

The laser and plasma conditions expected in ignition experiments using indirect drive inertial confinement have been studied experimentally. It has been shown that there are at least three ways in which ion waves can be stimulated in these plasmas and have significant effect on the energy balance and distribution in the target. First ion waves can be stimulated by a single laser beam by the process of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) in which an ion acoustic and a scattered electromagnetic wave grow from noise. Second, in a plasma where more than one beam intersect, ion waves can Lie excited at the `beat` frequency and wave number of the intersecting beams,, causing the side scatter instability to be seeded, and substantial energy to be transferred between the beams [R. K. Kirkwood et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 2065 (1996)]. And third, ion waves may be stimulated by the decay of electron plasma waves produced by Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), thereby inhibiting the SRS process [R. K. Kirkwood et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 2706 (1996)]