1. The use of biologging technology has increased exponentially over the last decade, allowing us to study animal behaviour at a level of detail not previously possible. 2. It is clear from recent meta-analyses that the attachment of such devices can have negative effects on individual animals, particularly their behaviour and physiology. In recognition of this, a commonly applied rule is to ensure that devices borne by flying animals weigh less than 5% of their...

Social bees represent an important group of pollinating insects but can be exposed to potentially harmful pesticides when foraging on treated or contaminated flowering plants. To investigate if such exposure is detrimental to bees, many studies have exclusively fed individuals with pesticide spiked food, informing us about the hazard but not necessarily the risk of exposure. Whilst such studies are important to establish the physiological and behavioural effects on individuals they do not consider the...

Urbanisation represents a rapidly growing driver of land-use change. While it is clear that urbanisation impacts species abundance and diversity, direct effects of urban land-use on animal reproductive success are rarely documented. Here we show that urban land-use is linked to long-term colony reproductive output in a key pollinator. We reared colonies from wild-caught bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) queens, placed them at sites characterised by varying degrees of urbanisation from inner city to rural farmland, and...

All Lepidoptera produce two sperm types: normal, nucleated ‘eupyrene’ sperm and anucleate ‘apyrene’ sperm. One hypothesis for the evolution of apyrene sperm suggests that they act to reduce female remating rate. Apyrene sperm require less resources to produce than do eupyrene sperm, and could delay remating by females by acting as a “cheap filler”, packing the spermatheca and thereby reducing receptivity. This would reduce the risk of sperm competition, giving a potential adaptive advantage to...

Floral foraging resources are valuable for pollinator conservation on farmland, and their provision is encouraged by agri-environment schemes in many countries. Across Europe, wildflower seed mixtures are widely sown on farmland to encourage pollinators, but the extent to which key pollinator groups such as solitary bees exploit and benefit from these resources is unclear. We used high-throughput sequencing of 164 pollen samples extracted from the brood cells of 6 common cavity nesting solitary bee species...

Here we assess the impact of geographically dependent (latitude, longitude and altitude) changes in bioclimatic (temperature, precipitation and primary productivity) variability on fungal fruiting phenology across Europe. Two main nutritional guilds of fungi, saprotrophic and ectomycorrhizal, were further separated into spring and autumn fruiters. We used a path‐analysis to investigate how biogeographic patterns in fungal fruiting phenology coincided with seasonal changes in climate and primary production. Across central to northern Europe, mean fruiting varied by...

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...

Within-species diversity is often driven by changing selective regimes along environmental gradients. Here, we provide a direct test of the environmental factors underlying phenotypic diversity across the wide native distribution of eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki). We investigated life-history and body-shape divergence (including multiple measures of body size) across more than 14 degrees of latitude in North America, and used Akaike’s information criterion-based model selection to determine the relative contributions of thermal regime, population densities and...

Variation in the diet of generalist insectivores can be affected by site-specific traits including weather, habitat, and season, as well as demographic traits like reproductive status and age. We used molecular methods to compare diets of three distinct New Zealand populations of lesser short-tailed bats, Mystacina tuberculata. Summer diets were compared between a southern cold-temperate (Eglinton) and a northern population (Puroera). Winter diets were compared between Pureora and a subtropical offshore island population (Hauturu). This...

Objective: To investigate the influence of microglial activation in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease trajectory, we assessed the relationship between microglial activation and grey matter volume and hippocampal volume in MCI patients. Methods: In this study, fifty-five participants (37 early stages MCI and 18 controls) underwent [11C]PBR28 PET, a marker of microglial activation; volumetric MRI to evaluate grey matter and hippocampal volumes as well as clinical and neuropsychometric evaluation. [11C]PBR28 VT (volume of distribution)...

Strong sexual selection has been reported to both enhance and hinder the adaptive capacity and persistence of populations when exposed to novel environments. Consequently, how sexual selection influences population adaption and persistence under stress remains widely debated. Here we present two empirical investigations of the fitness consequences of sexual selection on populations of the Indian meal moth, Plodia interpunctella, exposed to stable or gradually increasing temperatures. When faced with increasing temperatures strong sexual selection was...

Harboring many range-restricted and specialized species, high elevation tropical cloud forests are diverse habitats represented in many protected areas. Despite this, many such areas receive little practical protection from deforestation and land conversion. Moreover, montane species may be more sensitive to climate change owing to various factors affecting community assembly across elevational gradients. Few studies have used annual monitoring to assess how biological communities in cloud forests may be shifting in response to habitat or...