Environmentally transmitted parasites spend time in the abiotic environment, where they are subjected to a variety of stressors. Understanding how they face this challenge is essential if we are to understand how host-parasite interactions may vary across environmental gradients. We used a zooplankton-bacteria host-parasite system where availability of sunlight (solar radiation) influences disease dynamics to look for evidence of parasite local adaptation to sunlight exposure. We also examined how variation in sunlight tolerance among parasite...

The biogeochemistry of the Gulf of Maine is rapidly changing in response to a changing climate, including rising temperatures, acidification, and declining primary productivity. These impacts are projected to worsen over the next hundred years and will apply selective pressure on populations of marine calcifiers. This study investigates the transcriptome expression response to these changes in ecologically and economically important marine calcifiers, blue mussels. Wild mussels (Mytilus edulis and M. trossulus) were sampled from sites...

Inbreeding is a potent evolutionary force shaping the distribution of genetic variation within and among populations of plants and animals. Yet, our understanding of the forces shaping the expression and evolution of non-random mating in general, and inbreeding in particular, remains remarkably incomplete. Most research on plant mating systems focuses on self-fertilization and its consequences for automatic selection, inbreeding depression, purging, and reproductive assurance, whereas studies of animal mating systems have often assumed that inbreeding...

Background: An increasing number of hybrid zones with varying evolutionary outcomes have been documented from different reef fish families. In the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP), four species of parrotfishes occur in sympatry on rocky reefs from Baja California to Ecuador: Scarus. compressus,S. ghobban, S. perrico, and S. rubroviolaceus; and have complex phylogeographic histories. The most divergent,S. perrico, belongs to a Tropical American clade that diverged from a Central Indo-Pacific ancestor in the late Miocene (6.6...