1. Identification of pollen vectors is a fundamental objective of pollination biology. The foraging and social behavior of these pollinators has profound effects on plant mating, making quantification of their behaviour critical for understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of different pollinators for the plants they visit. However, accurate quantification of visitation may be problematic, especially for shy animals and/or when the temporal and spatial scale of observation desired is large. Sophisticated heat- and movement-triggered...

Species coexistence is often facilitated by behavioral strategies that minimize competition for limited resources. Terrestrial, lungless salamanders (genus Plethodon) coexist in predictable assemblages of body size guilds, but little is known about the behavioral mechanisms that promote such coexistence. Here, we considered the hypothesis that Plethodon salamanders use climbing behavior to reduce competitive interactions, thereby promoting coexistence through spatial partitioning. To explore this hypothesis, we quantified the frequency of climbing behavior at field sites where...

Premise of the Study— The Caryophyllales contains ~12,500 species and is known for its cosmopolitan distribution, convergence of trait evolution, and extreme adaptations. Some relationships within the Caryophyllales, like those of many large plant clades, remain unclear and phylogenetic studies often recover alternative hypotheses. We explore the utility of broad and dense transcriptome sampling across the order for resolving evolutionary relationships in Caryophyllales. Methods— We generated 84 transcriptomes and combined these with 224 publicly available...