Rewilding is gaining momentum as a new approach to restore and conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, despite being imprecisely defined, controversial, and with limited explicit empirical supporting evidence (Lorimer et al., 2015; Pettorelli et al., 2018; Svenning et al., 2016). In a case study region (the English uplands), we discuss what rewilding means to practitioners and policy makers; the risks, opportunities, and barriers to implementation, and potential paths for policy and practice.

1. Worldwide declines in pollinators, including bumblebees, are attributed to a multitude of stressors such as habitat loss, resource availability, emerging viruses and parasites, exposure to pesticides, and climate change operating at various spatial and temporal scales. Disentangling individual and interacting effects of these stressors, and understanding their impact at the individual, colony and population level is a challenge for systems ecology. Empirical testing of all combinations and contexts is not feasible. A mechanistic multi-level...

Vegetative dormancy, that is the temporary absence of aboveground growth for ≥ 1 year, is paradoxical, because plants cannot photosynthesise or flower during dormant periods. We test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses for its widespread persistence. We show that dormancy has evolved numerous times. Most species displaying dormancy exhibit life‐history costs of sprouting, and of dormancy. Short‐lived and mycoheterotrophic species have higher proportions of dormant plants than long‐lived species and species with other nutritional modes. Foliage...

The age profile of populations fundamentally affects their conservation status. Yet age is frequently difficult to assess in wild animals. Here, we assessed the use of DNA methylation of homologous genes to establish the age structure of a rare and elusive wild mammal: the Bechstein’s bat (Myotis bechsteinii). We collected 62 wing punches from individuals whose ages were known as a result of a long-term banding study. DNA methylation was measured at seven CpG sites...

Sex allocation theory predicts that simultaneous hermaphrodites evolve to an evolutionary stable resource allocation, whereby any increase in investment to male reproduction leads to a disproportionate cost on female reproduction and vice-versa. However, empirical evidence for sexual trade-offs in hermaphroditic animals is still limited. Here, we tested how male and female reproductive traits evolved under conditions of reduced selection on either male or female reproduction for 40 generations in a hermaphroditic snail. This selection favors...

It has long been suspected that the rate of mutation varies across the human genome at a large scale based on the divergence between humans and other species. However, it is now possible to directly investigate this question using the large number of de novo mutations (DNMs) that have been discovered in humans through the sequencing of trios. We investigate a number of questions pertaining to the distribution of mutations using more than 130,000 DNMs...

Animal eyes have evolved to process behaviorally important visual information, but how retinas deal with statistical asymmetries in visual space remains poorly understood. Using hyperspectral imaging in the field, in vivo 2-photon imaging of retinal neurons, and anatomy, here we show that larval zebrafish use a highly anisotropic retina to asymmetrically survey their natural visual world. First, different neurons dominate different parts of the eye and are linked to a systematic shift in inner retinal...

One benefit of group living is vigilance against predators. Previous studies have investigated the group size effect, where individual vigilance decreases as group size increases without reducing the overall ability of the group to detect predators. However, there has been comparatively little research on whether the positioning of individuals can improve the collective vigilance of the group. We studied the coordination of vigilance and its effect on predator detection in the eusocial bee Tetragonisca angustula....

1. Functional traits and functional diversity measures are increasingly being used to examine land use effects on biodiversity and community assembly rules. 2. Morphological traits are frequently derived from a mean value of many individuals, and used directly as functional traits. However, this approach overlooks the importance of intraspecific differences. 3. We collected morphometric data from over 1700 individuals of 12 species of dung beetle to establish whether morphological measurements can be used as predictors...

Colour vision mediates ecologically relevant tasks for many animals, such as mate choice, foraging and predator avoidance. However, our understanding of animal colour perception is largely derived from human psychophysics, even though animal visual systems differ from our own. Behavioural tests of non-human animals are required to understand how colour signals are perceived by them. Here we introduce a novel test of colour vision in animals inspired by the Ishihara colour charts, which are widely...

This paper presents high accuracy correlation energies, intracule densities and Coulomb hole(s) for the lithium cation, helium, hydride ion and the system with the critical nuclear charge, Z_C, for binding two electrons. The fully-correlated (FC) wavefunction and the Hartree-Fock (HF) wavefunction are both determined using a Laguerre-based wavefunction. It is found that for the lithium cation and the helium atom a secondary Coulomb hole is present, in agreement with a previous literature finding, confirming a...

Cytoplasmic dynein 1 is a dimeric motor protein that walks and transports intracellular cargos towards the minus end of microtubules. In this article we formulate, based on physical principles, a mechanical model to describe the stepping behaviour of cytoplasmic dynein walking on microtubules from the cell membrane towards the nucleus. Unlike previous studies on physical models of this nature, we base our formulation on the whole structure of cytoplasmic dynein 1 to include the temporal...

Understanding how wild immune variation covaries with other traits can reveal how costs and trade-offs shape immune evolution in the wild. Divergent life history strategies may increase or alleviate immune costs, helping shape immune variation in a consistent, testable way. Contrasting hypotheses suggest that shorter life histories may alleviate costs by offsetting them against increased mortality; or increase the effect of costs if immune responses are traded off against development or reproduction. We investigated the...