ArticleBiology letters2020
Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations.
Article in Biology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution under the city's shadow: reproductive divergence of urban and rural great tits revealed by a common garden experiment.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Life history and ecology shape global patterns in avian hatching failure rates.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Demographic drivers of reproductive failure in a threatened bird: Insights from a decade of data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genotyping blastoderms of avian eggs.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Selfish centromeres and the wastefulness of human reproduction.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Inheritance of the duration of fertility in chickens and its correlation with laying performance.Genetics, selection, evolution : GSE · 2022Article
- Physiological factors influencing female fertility in birds.Royal Society open science · 2021Review
- Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations.Biology letters · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prenatal mortality is typically overlooked in population studies, which biases evolutionary inference by confounding selection and inheritance. Birds represent an opportunity to include this 'invisible fraction' if each egg contains a zygote, but whether hatching failure is caused by fertilization failure versus prenatal mortality is largely unknown. We quantified fertilization failure rates in two bird species that are popular systems for studying evolutionary dynamics and found that overwhelming majorities (99.9%) of laid eggs were fertilized. These systems thus present opportunities to eliminate the invisible fraction from life-history data.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.