Reproductive state/condition

Bauer and Abdalla (2001) proposed an alternative hypothesis to explain the apparent male awareness within a short period of an upcoming female parturial molt in aggregating species. Females of such species are actually hiding their reproductive condition until the molt to prevent harassment from males. Males simply may be sensing a female metabolite, indicating her reproductive state that she can no longer control as the actual molt approaches. 

For female-to-female communication, the relevance of these chemicals appears restricted to females in the follicular phase. However, reproductive state is not an on-off condition. Hormone levels change cyclically and so responses are likely to be graded rather than discrete. The frequency of the main behaviors and the duration of time near the sample provide some degree of graded responsiveness. Yet, individual variation in these main response behaviors and the quantification of additional behaviors related to... 

In adverse conditions, some bacteria can enter a dormant state known as a spore. Spores can remain dormant for decades and can survive under extreme temperatures and other adverse environmental conditions. Unlike fungi (Chapter 20), formation of spores is not related to reproduction and is done strictly as a protective mechanism. Upon reactivation, each spore produces a single active bacteria. Spores are normally spherical or oval and are only a fraction of the size of the active (i.e., vegetative) cell. 

Pulsatilla possesses sedative, analgesic, antispasmodic, and bactericidal properties. Traditionally, it is used for dysmenorrhea, orchitis, ovaralgia, epididymitis, tension headache, hyperactive states, insomnia, boils, skin eruptions associated with bacterial infection, asthma and pulmonary disease, earache, and specifically for painful conditions of the male and female reproductive systems. Pulsatilla is widely used in homoeopathic preparations as well as in herbal medicine. 

The DNA bases involved in reproduction have short S excited state lifetimes of the order of one picosecond or less [13, 15, 19, 23, 73-75], It has been argued that this phenomenon serves to protect these bases against photochemical damage, because following excitation they do not cross to the reactive triplet state, but instead they rapidly internally convert to the electronic ground state [76], This may have been particularly significant under the conditions of the early earth when purines and pyrimidines presumably were assembled into the first macromolecular structures, producing RNA. 

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