Reproductive Physiology is concerned with the mechanisms that animals use to control reproduction.
Research typically focuses on parts of the reproductive axis, which in vertebrates is composed of the brain, the pituitary gland and the gonads – how is this axis affected by environmental factors (e.g., stress, season, nutrition) or other hormones, and how do the products from this axis affect the development of the growing germ cells?
How have such mechanisms, for example, the signalling by steroid hormones, developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and how may studies of reproductive physiology assist conservation of threatened species? These questions are addressed by a variety of field- and laboratory-based approaches.