Protected areas provide major benefits for humans in the form of ecosystem services, but landscape degradation by human activity at their edges may compromise their ecological functioning. Using multiple lines of evidence from 40 years of research in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, we find that such edge degradation has effectively “squeezed” wildlife into the core protected area and has altered the ecosystem’s dynamics even within this 40,000-square-kilometer ecosystem. This spatial cascade reduced resilience in the core...

• Premise of the study: Polyploidy, or whole genome duplication (WGD), is common in plants despite theory suggesting that polyploid establishment is challenging and polyploids should be evolutionarily transitory. There is renewed interest in understanding the mechanisms that could facilitate polyploid establishment and explain their pervasiveness in nature. In particular, premating isolation from their diploid progenitors is suggested to be a crucial factor. In order to evaluate how changes in assortative mating occur, we need...

Phenotypic plasticity can allow organisms to respond to environmental changes by producing better matching phenotypes without any genetic change. Because of this, plasticity is predicted to be a major mechanism by which a population can survive the initial stage of colonizing a novel environment. We tested this prediction by challenging wild Drosophila melanogaster with increasingly extreme larval environments and then examining expression of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and its relationship to larval survival in the first...

Spermatozoa are the most morphologically variable cell type, yet little is known about genes controlling natural variation in sperm shape. Drosophila fruit flies have evolved the longest sperm known, which are evolving under postcopulatory sexual selection, driven by sperm competition and cryptic female choice. Long sperm outcompete short sperm but primarily when females have long seminal receptacles (SRs), the primary sperm storage organ. Thus, selection on sperm length is mediated by SR length, and the...

Interacting species can respond differently to climate change, causing unexpected consequences. Many understory wildflowers in deciduous forests leaf out and flower in the spring when light availability is highest before overstory canopy closure. Therefore, different phenological responses by understory and overstory species to increased spring temperature could have significant ecological implications. Pairing contemporary data with historical observations initiated by Henry David Thoreau (1850s), we found that overstory tree leaf out is more responsive to increased...

Wang and Althoff (2019) explored the capacity of Drosophila melanogaster to exhibit adaptive plasticity in a novel environment. In a full-sib, half-sib design, they scored the activity of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and plastic responses, measured as changes in ADH activity across ethanol concentrations in the range of 0-10% (natural variation) and 16% (the novel environment). ADH activity increased with alcohol concentration, and there was a positive association between larval viability and ADH activity...

Highland native Andeans have resided at altitude for millennia. They display high aerobic capacity (VO2max) at altitude and this may be a reflection of genetic adaptation to chronic hypoxia. Previous genome-wide (GW) scans for natural selection have nominated EGLN1 as a candidate gene. The encoded protein, EGLN1/PHD2, is an O2 sensor that controls levels of the Hypoxia Inducible Factor-a (HIF-a), which regulates the cellular response to hypoxia. From GWAS and ANCOVA performed on a total...