Understanding variation in resource specialization is important for progress on issues that include coevolution, community assembly, ecosystem processes, and the latitudinal gradient of species richness. Herbivorous insects are useful models for studying resource specialization, and the interaction between plants and herbivorous insects is one of the most common and consequential ecological associations on the planet. However, uncertainty persists regarding fundamental features of herbivore diet breadth, including its relationship to latitude and plant species richness. Here...

Grass inflorescence and stem branches show recognizable architectural differences among species. The inflorescence branches of Triticeae cereals and grasses, including wheat, barley, and 400–500 wild species, are usually contracted into a spike formation, with the number of flowering branches (spikelets) per node conserved within species and genera. Perennial Triticeae grasses of genus Leymus are unusual in that the number of spikelets per node varies, inflorescences may have panicle branches, and vegetative stems may form subterranean...

This publication presents the complete 20-year record of volumetric soil moisture in the 18 plots of the CARBONO Project in the old-growth tropical rainforest at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica. The measurements were made biweekly through the period March 1998 – October 2018. Volumetric soil moisture was assessed over the top 30 cm of soil. The publication consists of the full data record and documentation of the cross-sensor regressions.

Polistes paper wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) are species-rich group of social insects. Researchers have noted a wide diversity in facial color patterns among species, and for several Polistes species, intraspecific variation in facial color patterns has been linked to signals of quality or individual identity. However, there have been no systematic descriptions of facial color pattern variation across the Polistes genera, limiting our understanding of the frequency of facial color patterns, how unique patterns are among...

Wood performs several essential functions in plants, including mechanically supporting aboveground tissue, storing water and other resources, and transporting sap. Woody tissues are likely to face physiological, structural and defensive trade-offs. How a plant optimizes among these competing functions can have major ecological implications, which have been under-appreciated by ecologists compared to the focus they have given to leaf function. To draw together our current understanding of wood function, we identify and collate data on...

Aim: We compared the parasite assemblages of over-wintering migratory birds and permanent residents on the wintering grounds. We determined whether parasite sharing between migratory and resident birds is influenced by host phylogenetic relatedness. We then inferred whether migratory birds transport haemosporidian parasite lineages between the breeding and wintering grounds. Location: Sierra de Bahoruco National Park, Dominican Republic, Hispaniola Taxa: Migratory and resident birds (primarily Aves: Passeriformes) and their haemosporidian parasites (order Haemosporida, Plasmodium, Haemoproteus and...

Nonequilibrium phase transitions from survival to extinction have recently been observed in computational models of evolutionary dynamics. Dynamical signatures predictive of population collapse have been observed in yeast populations under stress. We experimentally investigate the population response of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to biological stressors (temperature and salt concentration) in order to investigate the system’s behavior in the vicinity of population collapse. While both conditions lead to population decline, the dynamical characteristics of the...

Sex-specific cognitive abilities are well documented. These can occur when sexes engage in different ecological contexts. Less known is whether different ecological contexts can also drive sex-specific participation rates in behavioral tests. Here, we explore this question in bumble bees, a group of eusocial insects where worker females and males exhibit stark socioecological differences. Among myriad colony maintenance tasks, workers forage for themselves and developing brood, while males forage only for themselves while mate-searching. Following...

We examined population genetic structure and fine-scale spatial genetic structure (FSGS) in six perennial understory angiosperms in Andean cloud forests of northwestern Ecuador. Species belong to three families (Gesneriaceae, Melastomataceae, and Rubiaceae), and within each family we paired one insect-pollinated with one hummingbird-pollinated species, predicting that insect-pollinated species have greater population differentiation (as quantified with the FST statistic) and stronger FSGS (as quantified with the SP statistic) than hummingbird-pollinated species.

Shelter building is widespread in the animal world and such shelters often influence the success of their builders. Shelters built by caterpillars influence the likelihood of attacks by natural enemies, but how particular shelter traits influence caterpillar survival is not known. Furthermore, the differential effects of certain shelter traits on some natural enemies, such as predators, may lead to “enemy-free space” for other natural enemies (parasitoids). The parasitoid enemy-free space hypothesis has not been directly...

Phase transitions are an important and extensively studied concept in physics. The insights derived from understanding phase transitions in physics have also recently and successfully been applied to a number of different phenomena in biological systems. Here, we provide a brief review of phase transitions and their role in explaining biological processes ranging from collective behavior in animal flocks to neuronal firing. We also highlight a new and exciting area where phase transition theory is...

Kin selection and multilevel selection theory are often used to interpret experiments about the evolution of cooperation and social behaviour among microbes. But while these experiments provide rich, detailed fitness data, theory is mostly used as a conceptual heuristic. Here, evaluate how kin and multilevel selection theory perform as quantitative analysis tools. We reanalyse published microbial datasets and show that the canonical fitness models of both theories are almost always poor fits because they use...

Elton’s biotic resistance hypothesis, which posits that diverse communities should be more resistant to biological invasions, has received considerable experimental support. However, it remains unclear whether such a negative diversity–invasibility relationship would persist under anthropogenic environmental change. By using the common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) as a model invader, our four-year grassland experiment demonstrated consistently negative relationships between resident species diversity and community invasibility, irrespective of nitrogen addition, a result further supported by a meta-analysis. Importantly,...

We used occurrence data of 183 oak species (Quercus spp.) in North and South America to test how niche breadth and niche position affect the amount of suitable habitat area, and how colonization ability and post-glacial migration lags affect range filling. This dataset includes the data and R files related to the analyses.

Recent expansion of microbiome research has uncovered connections between resident microbial communities and blood parasite risk, establishing the potential for microbial disease treatments such as probiotics in the future. However, this field has largely focused on humans and model organisms, leaving much unknown about how microbial communities might directly or indirectly impact parasite infection in wild populations and non-mammals. To contribute to this knowledge base in wild birds, we collected fecal and blood samples from...

Tropical rainforest canopies, where stems and crowns reside, are hotspots of biological diversity, mediate the global biochemical processes and are the interface between organic nature and the atmosphere. Ecosystem functions such as growth, competition and mortality, depend on the spatial arrangement of tree crowns that varies significantly across forest types and disturbance gradients. The exact nature and function of tropical tree canopies are not well known. Field inventories often focus on measuring the horizontal component...

The role of polyploidy, particularly allopolyploidy, in plant diversification is a subject of debate. Whole-genome duplications precede the origins of many major clades (e.g., angiosperms, Brassicaceae, Poaceae), suggesting that polyploidy drives diversification. However, theoretical arguments and empirical studies suggest that polyploid lineages may actually have lower speciation rates and higher extinction rates than diploid lineages. We focus here on the grass tribe Andropogoneae, an economically and ecologically important group of C4 species with a high...

Early flowering plants are thought to have been woody species restricted to warm habitats1, 2, 3. This lineage has since radiated into almost every climate, with manifold growth forms4. As angiosperms spread and climate changed, they evolved mechanisms to cope with episodic freezing. To explore the evolution of traits underpinning the ability to persist in freezing conditions, we assembled a large species-level database of growth habit (woody or herbaceous; 49,064 species), as well as leaf...

Siparunaceae comprise Glossocalyx with one species in West Africa and Siparuna with 65 species in the neotropics; all have unisexual flowers, and 15 species are monoecious, 50 dioecious. Parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses of combined nuclear ribosomal ITS and chloroplast trnL-trnF intergenic spacer sequences yielded almost identical topologies, which were used to trace the evolution of the two sexual systems. The African species, which is dioecious, was sister to all neotropical species, and the monoecious...

Background: Sensory Bias models for the evolution of mate preference place a great emphasis on the role of sensory system variation in mate preferences. However, the extent to which sensory systems vary across- versus within-species remains largely unknown. Here we assessed whether color vision varies in natural locations where guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and their two closest relatives, Poecilia parae and Poecilia picta, occur in extreme sympatry and school together. All three species base mate preferences...

Understanding how pathogens and parasites diversify through time and space is fundamental to predicting emerging infectious diseases. Here, we use biogeographic, coevolutionary and phylogenetic analyses to describe the origin, diversity, and distribution of avian malaria parasites in the most diverse avifauna on Earth. We first performed phylogenetic analyses using the mitochondrial cytochrome b (cyt b) gene to determine relationships among parasite lineages. Then, we estimated divergence times and reconstructed ancestral areas to uncover how landscape...

Evaluating the factors that drive patterns of population differentiation in plants is critical for understanding several biological processes such as local adaptation and incipient speciation. Previous studies have given conflicting results regarding the significance of pollination mode, seed dispersal mode, mating system, growth form, and latitudinal region in shaping patterns of genetic structure, as estimated by FST values, and no study to date has tested their relative importance together across a broad scale. Here we...

Given that the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is likely to continue, it is important to explore the ethical responsibilities of designers, manufacturers, operators, and regulators of the technology. We specifically focus on the ethical responsibilities surrounding autonomous vehicles that these stakeholders have to protect the safety of non-occupants, meaning individuals who are around the vehicles while they are operating. The term “non-occupants” includes, but is not limited to, pedestrians and cyclists. We are...

The distribution of canopy heights in tropical rain forests directly affects carbon storage and the maintenance of biodiversity. We report here raw field data on annually-measured canopy height distributions over an old-growth tropical rain forest landscape in Costa Rica from 1999-2018. The data were taken at 231 points on a 5 x 5 m grid in 18 0.50 ha plots that were initially sited with a stratified random design across local gradients of soil nutrients...

This publication presents four related data sets that describe canopy height distributions and estimated above-ground biomass across an old-growth tropical rain forest landscape at the La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, from 1992 – 2018. One data set contains measured forest heights that were taken annually from 1999-2018 at 231 points per plot in 18 0.50 ha forest inventory plots (9 plots in 1999, 18 thereafter). The second data set contains data from an annual...