Circadian rhythms enable organisms to synchronise the processes underpinning survival and reproduction to anticipate daily changes in the external environment. Recent work shows that daily (circadian) rhythms also enable parasites to maximise fitness in the context of ecological interactions with their hosts. Because parasite rhythms matter for their fitness, understanding how they are regulated could lead to innovative ways to reduce the severity and spread of diseases. Here, we examine how host circadian rhythms influence...

Reproduction in wild animals can divert limited resources away from immune defence, resulting in increased parasite burdens. A longstanding prediction of life history theory states that these parasites can harm the individual, reducing the organism’s subsequent fitness and producing reproduction-fitness tradeoffs. Here, we examined associations among reproductive allocation, immunity, parasitism, and subsequent fitness in a wild population of individually identified red deer ( Cervus elaphus ). Using path analysis, we investigated whether costs of lactation...

This data set includes the original time series collected with broadband and long-period MT instruments during two field seasons in 2016 and 2017 by a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, UK and the Institute for Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy at Addis Ababa university, Ethiopia. For the magnetotelluric stations, processed transfer functions are included in the edi file format. The time series data is provided both in the original raw data format...

Late Cretaceous trends in Asian dinosaur diversity are poorly understood, but recent discoveries have documented a radiation of oviraptorosaur theropods in China and Mongolia. However, little work has addressed the factors that facilitated this diversification. A new oviraptorid from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia sheds light on the evolution of the forelimb, which appears to have played a role in the radiation of oviraptorosaurs. Surprisingly, the reduced arm has only two functional digits, highlighting a...

The consequences of mutations for population fitness depends on their individual selection coefficients and the effective population size. An earlier study of Caenorhabditis elegans spontaneous mutation accumulation lines evolved for 409 generations at three population sizes found that Ne = 1 populations declined significantly in fitness whereas the fitness of larger populations (Ne = 5, 50) was indistinguishable from the ancestral control under benign conditions. To test if larger MA populations harbor a load of...

Parental care is highly variable, reflecting that parents make flexible decisions in response to variation in the cost of care to themselves and the benefit to their offspring. Much of the evidence that parents respond to such variation derives from handicapping and brood size manipulations, the separate effects of which are well understood. However, little is known about their joint effects. Here we fill this gap by conducting a joint handicapping and brood size manipulation...

The high degree of endemism on Sulawesi has previously been suggested to have vicariant origins, dating back 40 Myr ago. Recent studies, however, suggest that much of Sulawesi’s fauna assembled over the last 15 Myr. Here, we test the hypothesis that more recent uplift of previously submerged portions of land on Sulawesi promoted diversification, and that much of its faunal assemblage is much younger than the island itself. To do so, we combined palaeogeographical reconstructions...

Despite an extensive body of theoretical and empirical literature on biparental cooperation, it is still unclear whether offspring fare equally, better, or worse when receiving care by two parents versus a single parent. Some models predict that parents should withhold the amount of care they provide due to sexual conflict, thereby shifting as much of the workload as possible to their partner. This conflict should lead to offspring faring worse with two parents. Yet, other...

Linking intraspecific and interspecific divergence is an important challenge in speciation research. X chromosomes are expected to evolve faster than autosomes and disproportionately contribute to reproductive barriers, and comparing genetic variation on X and autosomal markers within and between species can elucidate evolutionary processes that shape genome variation. We performed RADseq on a 16-population transect of two closely-related Australian cricket species, Teleogryllus commodus and T. oceanicus, covering allopatry and sympatry. This classic study system for...

Aim: The sorting of functional traits along environmental gradients is an important driver of community and landscape scale patterns of functional diversity. However, the significance of environmental factors in driving functional gradients within biomes and across continents remains poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the relationship of soil nutrients and climate to leaf traits in grasses (Poaceae) that are hypothesised to reflect different strategies of resource-use along gradients of resource availability. Location: Global Taxon: Poaceae Methods:...

We examined alterations in E/I-balance in schizophrenia (ScZ) through measurements of resting-state gamma-band activity in participants meeting clinical high-risk (CHR) criteria (n = 88), 21 first episode (FEP) patients and 34 chronic ScZ-patients. Furthermore, MRS-data were obtained in CHR-participants and matched controls. Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) resting-state activity was examined at source level and MEG-data were correlated with neuropsychological scores and clinical symptoms. CHR-participants were characterized by increased 64–90 Hz power. In contrast, FEP- and ScZ-patients showed...

This data set comprises broadband magnetotelluric (MT) and transient electromagnetic (TEM) data collected during three field seasons in 2008, 2009 and 2010 by a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, UK, IMAGIR, Brest, France and the Institute for Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. The MT dataset includes the original time series and processed transfer functions. The time series data are provided in the original raw data format with...

Background: Rapid mobilisation from industry and academia following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), led to the development and availability of SARS-CoV-2 lateral flow immunoassays (LFAs). High-quality LFAs are urgently needed at the point of care to add to currently available diagnostic tools. In this study, we provide evaluation data for ten LFAs suitable for use at the point of care. Methods: COVID-19 positive patients (N=45), confirmed by...

Three specimens of lungfishes from the late Famennian of East Greenland are described. One forms the holotype of a new genus and species, Celsiodon ahlberg gen. et sp. nov., which, in cladistic analyses, is placed close to the Carboniferous genus Ctenodus. The analyses reveal some Late Devonian lungfishes clustering with Early Carboniferous taxa, suggesting that Late Devonian lungfishes included more crownward taxa than previously appreciated, and that the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary was more fluid for lungfish...

Interactions among siblings fall on a continuum with competition and cooperation at opposite ends of the spectrum. Prior work on the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides suggests that parental care shifts the balance between competition and cooperation by masking a density-dependent shift from cooperation to competition. However, these results should be interpreted with caution because they were based on correlational evidence for an association between larval density at dispersal and mean larval mass at dispersal. Here...

Coinfections with parasitic helminths and microparasites are highly common in nature and can lead to complex within-host interactions between parasite species which can cause negative health outcomes for humans, and domestic and wild animals. Many of these negative health effects worsen with increasing parasite burdens. However, even though many studies have identified several key factors that determine worm burdens across various host systems, less is known about how the immune response interacts with these factors...

The regional distribution of adipose tissues is implicated in a wide range of diseases. For example, proportional increases in visceral adipose tissue increase the risk for insulin resistance, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Zebrafish offer a tractable model system by which to obtain unbiased and quantitative phenotypic information on regional adiposity, and deep phenotyping can explore complex disease-related adiposity traits. To facilitate deep phenotyping of zebrafish adiposity traits, we used pairwise correlations between 67 adiposity traits...

These files provide statement pair extractions from the Europarl corpus of the same known source language directly translated to the target langages.

Parent and offspring behaviours are expected to act as both the agents and targets of selection. This may generate parent-offspring coadaptation in which parent and offspring behaviours become genetically correlated in a way that increases inclusive fitness. Cross-fostering has been used to study parent-offspring coadaptation, with the prediction that offspring raised by non-relatives, or parents raising non-relatives, should suffer fitness costs. Using long-term data from more than 400 partially crossed broods of blue tits (Cyanistes...

Humans have elevated global extinction rates and thus lowered global-scale species richness. However, there is no a priori reason to expect that losses of global species richness should always, or even often, trickle down to losses of species richness at regional and local scales, even though this relationship is often assumed. Here, we show that scale can modulate our estimates of species richness change through time in the face of anthropogenic pressures, but not in...

It is often stated that polymorphisms for mutations affecting fitness of males and females in opposite directions [sexually antagonistic (SA) polymorphisms] are the main selective force for the evolution of recombination suppression between sex chromosomes. However, empirical evidence to discriminate between different hypotheses is difficult to obtain. We report genetic mapping results in laboratory-raised families of the guppy (Poecilia reticulata), a sexually dimorphic fish with SA polymorphisms for male coloration genes, mostly on the sex...

Pesticide ingestion is a leading method for suicide worldwide. Paraquat is a highly lethal herbicide when ingested. We assessed the impact of the first-stage ban on the import and production of paraquat (from February 2018) on suicides by pesticide poisoning in Taiwan. Suicide data by method (pesticide vs. non-pesticide), pesticide (paraquat vs. non-paraquat), and area/sex/age were extracted from the national cause-of-death data files (2011–2019). Negative binomial regression was used to estimate changes in suicide rates...

We show that a systematic discrepancy between model simulations and proxy reconstructions of hemispheric temperature changes over the past millennium appears to arise from a small number of radiatively large volcanic eruptions. Past work has shown that accounting for this mismatch alone appears to reconcile inconsistencies between the overall amplitude of simulated and proxy-reconstructed temperature changes. We provide empirical support for the previously posited hypothesis that this discrepancy may arise from threshold growth effects in...

Uncertainty affects estimates of the power potential of tidal currents, resulting in large ranges in values reported for a given site, such as the Pentland Firth, UK. We examine the role of bottom friction, one of the most important sources of uncertainty. We do so by using perturbation methods to find the leading-order effect of bottom friction uncertainty in theoretical models by Garrett & Cummins (2005), Vennell (2010), and Garrett & Cummins (2013), which consider...

To prevent new infections with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) in sub-Saharan Africa, UNAIDS recommends targeting interventions to populations that are at high risk of acquiring and passing on the virus. Yet it is often unclear who and where these ‘source’ populations are. Here we demonstrate how viral deep-sequencing can be used to reconstruct HIV-1 transmission networks and to infer the direction of transmission in these networks. We are able to deep-sequence virus from...