In tropical forests, insect herbivores exert significant pressure on plant populations. Adaptation to such pressure is hypothesized to be a driver of high tropical diversity, but direct evidence for local adaptation to herbivory in tropical forests is sparse. At the same time, herbivore pressure has been hypothesized to increase with rainfall in the tropics, which could lead to differences among sites in the degree of local adaptation. To assess the presence of local adaptation and...

Aim: Plant life forms characterize key morphological strategies that enable large-scale comparisons of plant communities. This study applies Raunkiær’s plant life form concept that was developed for temperate climate to a subtropical island flora, in parts, dominated by summer aridity. We quantify how plant life form patterns as well as patterns of important plant functional traits (PFTs) relate to important climate and topographic characteristics. Location: La Palma, Canary Islands Taxon: Flora of La Palma. Methods:...

Understanding giant impacts requires accurate description of how extreme pressures and temperatures affect the physical properties of the constituent materials. Here, we report shock experiments on two polymorphs of MgSiO3: enstatite and bridgmanite (perovskite) crystals. We obtain pressure-density shock equation of state to 14 Mbar and more than 9 g/cm3 a 40 % increase in density from previous data on MgSiO3. Density-functional-theory molecular dynamics (DFT-MD) simulations provide predictions for the shock Hugoniot curves for bridgmanite...

The vast majority of terrestrial plants exchange nutrients with fungal partners forming different mycorrhizal types. The minority of plants considered as non-mycorrhizal, however, are not necessarily free of any fungi, but are frequently colonized by elusive fungal endophytes, such as dark septate endophytes (DSE) or fine root endophytes (FRE). While a functional role of FRE in improvement of nutrient gain was recently elucidated, the function of DSE is still in discussion and was here addressed...

Human-driven extinctions can affect our understanding of evolution, through the nonrandom loss of certain types of species. Here, we explore how knowledge of a major evolutionary transition—the evolution of flightlessness in birds—is biased by anthropogenic extinctions. Adding data on 581 known anthropogenic extinctions to the extant avifauna increases the number of species by 5%, but quadruples the number of flightless species. The evolution of flightlessness in birds is a widespread phenomenon, occurring in more than...

Fully mycoheterotrophic plants are thought to obtain carbon exclusively from their root-associated fungal partners. The general enrichment of these plants in the heavy isotopes 13C and 15N suggests that fungi are the main nutrient source for these plants. Yet, the majority of studies have targeted mycoheterotrophic plants associated with ectomycorrhizal, orchid mycorrhizal and saprotrophic fungi, while mycoheterotrophic plants living on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi remain understudied. Here, we sampled 13 species of arbuscular mycorrhizal fully mycoheterotrophic...

Aim: Protected areas are essential to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem benefits to society under increasing human pressures of the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic climate change, however, threatens the enduring effectiveness of protected areas in conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, because it modifies and redistributes biodiversity with unknown consequences for ecosystem functioning within protected areas. Here we assess (1) the climate change exposure of the global terrestrial protected area estate and (2) the climate change vulnerability of...

Journal of Global Archaeology, 2020

Biological invasions are one of the major threats to biodiversity worldwide and contribute to changing community patterns and ecosystem processes. However, it is often not obvious whether an invader is the “driver” causing ecosystem changes or a “passenger” which is facilitated by previous ecosystem changes. Causality of the impact can be demonstrated by experimental removal of the invader or introduction into a native community. Using such an experimental approach, we tested whether the impact of...

The sharing of the same food source among parents and offspring can be a driver of the evolution of family life and parental care. However, if all family members desire the same meal, competitive situations can arise, especially if resource depletion is likely. When food is shared for reproduction and the raising of offspring, parents have to decide whether they should invest in self-maintenance or in their offspring and it is not entirely clear how...

Biomes are constructs for organising knowledge on the structure and functioning of the world's ecosystems, and serve as useful units for monitoring how the biosphere responds to anthropogenic drivers, including climate change. The current practice of delimiting biomes relies on expert knowledge. Recent studies have questioned the value of such biome maps for comparative ecology and global-change research, partly due to their subjective origin. Here we propose a flexible method for developing biome maps objectively....

Understanding how and why rates of evolutionary diversification vary is a central issue in evolutionary biology, ecology and biogeography. The concept of adaptive radiation has attracted much interest, but is metaphorical and verbal in nature, making it difficult to quantitatively compare different evolutionary lineages or geographic regions. In addition, the causes of evolutionary stasis are relatively neglected. Here we review the central concepts in the evolutionary diversification literature and bring these together by proposing a...

Animals continuously encounter microorganisms that are essential for health or cause disease. They are thus challenged to control harmful microbes while allowing acquisition of beneficial microbes. This challenge is likely especially important for social insects with respect to microbes in food, as they often store food and exchange food among colony members. Here we show that formicine ants actively swallow their antimicrobial, highly acidic poison gland secretion. The ensuing acidic environment in the stomach, the...

Little is empirically known about the contribution of mutations to fitness in natural environments. However, Fisher's Geometric Model (FGM) provides a conceptual foundation to consider the influence of the environment on mutational effects. To quantify mutational properties in the field, we established eight sets of MA lines (7-10 generations) derived from eight founders collected from natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana from French and Swedish sites, representing the range margins of the species in Europe. We...

Aim: Forest relicts in the mountainous regions of Africa represent one of the most diverse ecosystems on our planet, but the processes that have generated this remarkable diversity are still poorly understood. We estimate divergence times for an endemic, flightless grasshopper family and reconstruct a potential scenario for their colonization of Africa to test the hypothesis that the diversity of these mountain-top endemics has been generated by multiple fragmentations and reconnections of tropical rain forests...

Dung beetles (Scarabaeoidea) provide crucial ecosystem services and serve as model organisms for various behavioural, ecological and evolutionary studies. However, dung beetles have received little attention as consumers of large cadavers. In this study, we trapped copronecrophagous dung beetles on aboveground exposed piglet cadavers in 61 forest plots distributed over three geographically distinct regions in Germany, Central Europe. We examined the effects of land use intensity, forest stand, soil characteristics, vascular plant diversity and climatic...

Microbial volatiles provide essential information for animals, which compete to detect, respond to and perhaps control this information. Burying beetle parents have the opportunity to influence microbially-derived semiochemicals because they monopolize a small carcass for their family, repairing feeding holes and applying exudates that alter the microbial community. To study adaptive manipulation of microbial cues we integrated mechanistic and functional approaches. We contrasted Gas Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) volatile profiles from carcasses that were or...

Background. Drosanthemum, the only genus of the tribe Drosanthemeae, is widespread over the Greater Cape Floristic Region in southern Africa. With 114 recognized species, Drosanthemum together with the highly succulent and species-rich tribe Ruschieae constitute the ‘core ruschioids’ in Aizoaceae. Within Drosanthemum, nine subgenera have been described based on flower and fruit morphology. Their phylogenetic relationships, however, have not yet been investigated, hampering understanding of monophyletic entities and patterns of geographic distribution. Methods. Using chloroplast...

Colluvial deposits are considered as sedimentary archives for the reconstruction of soil erosion history, Holocene climate, past pedogenesis and land use. However, the human contribution to the formation of colluvial deposits is mainly based on quantitative assumptions derived from the local chronostratigraphy and archaeology. For this reason, there is often a substantial gap in the qualitative identification of specific land use practices that caused prehistoric soil erosion. We use an archaeopedological multi-proxy approach on a...

Understanding the mechanisms of species distribution within ecosystems is a fundamental question of ecological research. The current worldwide changes and loss of habitats associated with a decline in species richness render this topic a key element for developing mitigation strategies. Ecological niche theory is a widely accepted concept to describe species distribution along environmental gradients where each taxon occupies its own distinct set of environmental parameters, i.e. its niche. Niche occupation has been described in...

In seiner Kleinepik behandelt der Stricker die Macht von Preziosen in kritischer, dialektischer und unterhaltsamer Art und Weise. Bislang wurde in der Forschung dabei vor allem sein aufklärerischer, magiekritischer Impetus betont. Im hermeneutischen Vergleich seiner Kleinepik zeigt sich aber, dass der Stricker durchaus an einer magischen Dimension der Dinge festhält, die sich allerdings nur im Zusammenspiel der Physis der Dinge, der Erzählungen von ihren Mächten und der weisen Performanz mit ihnen entfaltet.