Few studies investigated whether rapid range expansion is associated with an individual's short-term fitness costs due to an increased risk of inbred mating at the front of expansion. In mating systems with low male mating rates both sexes share potential inbreeding costs and general mechanisms to avoid or reduce these costs are expected. The spider Argiope bruennichi expanded its range recently and we asked whether rapid settlement of new sites exposes individuals to a risk...

Deep-sea benthic Ostracoda (Crustacea) in Icelandic waters are poorly known. Here we report deep-sea ostracode assemblages from the multiple core (MUC) and the epibenthic sledge (EBS) samples collected from Icelandic waters by the first cruise of the IceAGE (Icelandic Marine Animals: Genetics and Ecology) project. Samples from shelf-edge and lower-bathyal working areas are examined. The results show (1) distinct MUC and EBS faunas due to the large difference in mesh size of MUC and EBS;...

BACKGROUND: Published nucleotide sequence data from the mega-diverse insect order Hymenoptera (sawflies, bees, wasps, and ants) are taxonomically scattered and still inadequate for reconstructing a well-supported phylogenetic tree for the order. The analysis of comprehensive multiple gene data sets obtained via targeted PCR could provide a cost-effective solution to this problem. However, oligonucleotide primers for PCR amplification of nuclear genes across a wide range of hymenopteran species are still scarce. FINDINGS: Here we present a...

Understanding and predicting the consequences of warming for complex ecosystems and indeed individual species remains a major ecological challenge. Here, we investigated the effect of increased seawater temperatures on the metabolic and consumption rates of five distinct marine species. The experimental species reflected different trophic positions within a typical benthic East Atlantic food web, and included a herbivorous gastropod, a scavenging decapod, a predatory echinoderm, a decapod and a benthic-feeding fish. We examined the metabolism–body...

In groups of socially foraging animals, feeding behaviour may change with group size in response to varying cost-benefit trade-offs. Numerous studies have described group size effects on group-average feeding behaviour, particularly emphasizing an increase in scrounging incidence for larger groups, where individuals (scroungers) feed from the food sources others (producers) discovered. However, individual variation in feeding behaviour remains unconsidered in the vast majority of these studies even though theoretical models presume individuals to specialize in...

The nutrient balancing hypothesis proposes that, when sufficient food is available, the primary goal of animal diet selection is to obtain a nutritionally balanced diet. This hypothesis can be tested using the Geometric Framework for nutrition (GF). The GF enables researchers to study patterns of nutrient intake (e.g. macronutrients; protein, carbohydrates, fat), interactions between the different nutrients, and how an animal resolves the potential conflict between over-eating one or more nutrients and under-eating others during...

Predation risk has negative indirect effects on prey fitness, partly mediated through changes in behaviour. Evidence that individuals gather social information from other members of the population suggests that events in a community may impact the behaviour of distant individuals. However, spatially wide-ranging impacts on individual behaviour caused by a predator encounter elsewhere in a community have not been documented before. We investigated the effect of a predator encounter (hawk model presented at a focal...

Müllerian mimicry is a classic example of adaptation, yet Müller’s original theory does not account for the persistence of diversity in mimicry rings, which has been a thorn in the side of one of the oldest models in evolutionary biology. Here, we aimed to assess how well classical Müllerian mimicry can account for the color polymorphism found in chemically defended Oreina leaf beetles, specifically testing its predictions for predator behavior. We also evaluated whether thermoregulation...

Most of the thermal tolerance studies on fish have been performed on juveniles and adults, whereas limited information is available for larvae, a stage which may have a particularly narrow range in tolerable temperatures. Moreover, previous studies on thermal limits for marine and freshwater fish larvae (53 studies reviewed here) applied a wide range of methodologies (e.g. the static or dynamic method, different exposure times), making it challenging to compare across taxa. We measured the...

Despite significant advances in invertebrate phylogenomics over the past decade, the higher-level phylogeny of Pycnogonida (sea spiders) remains elusive. Due to the inaccessibility of some small-bodied lineages, few phylogenetic studies have sampled all sea spider families. Previous efforts based on a handful of genes have yielded unstable tree topologies. Here, we inferred the relationships of 89 sea spider species using targeted capture of the mitochondrial genome, 56 conserved exons, 101 ultraconserved elements, and three nuclear...

READMEREADME of Supplementary Archives and included files of Evangelista et al. 2019Evangelista_et_al_README_DRYAD.pdfSupplementary Archive 1Files included in Supplementary Archive 1, see Evangelista_et_al_README_DRYAD.pdfSupplementary_Archive_1.zipSupplementary Archive 2Files included in Supplementary Archive 2, see Evangelista_et_al_README_DRYAD.pdfSupplementary_Archive_2.zip

Motivation: Leaf traits represent an important component of plant functional strategies, and those related to carbon fixation and nutrient acquisition form the leaf economics spectrum. However, observations of functional leaf traits are underrepresented in tropical regions in comparison with those in temperate areas. Brazil, a country with continental scale and vast biodiversity is a timely example, where many biomes are impacted by human activities and climate change. However, leaf traits relevant to understand vegetation responses...

Human habitat disturbance affects both species diversity and intraspecific genetic diversity, leading to correlations between these two components of biodiversity (termed species - genetic diversity correlation, SGDC). However, whether SGDC predictions extend to host-associated communities, such as the intestinal parasite and gut microbial diversity, remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the role of dominant generalist species is often neglected despite their importance in shaping the environment experienced by other members of the ecological community, and their role...

1. Background. Cumulative human pressures can induce non-linear discontinuous dynamics in ecosystems, known as regime shifts. Regime shifts typically imply hysteresis, a lacking or delayed system response when pressures are reverted, which can frustrate restoration efforts. 2. The goal of the study. Here we investigate whether the northern Adriatic Sea fish and macroinvertebrate community, depicted by commercial fishery landings, has undergone irreversible regime shifts over the last 40 years. 3. What was done. We use...

This dataset contains the input data and output data for the publication "Alternative splicing impacts microRNA regulation within coding regions". The input data is necessary for reproducing the pipeline, whereas the output data contains results from our run of the pipeline.

A fundamental challenge in ecology is to understand why species are found where they are and predict where they are likely to occur in the future. Trait-based approaches may provide such understanding, because it is the traits and adaptations of species that determine which environments they can inhabit. It is therefore important to identify key traits that determine species distributions and investigate how these traits relate to the environment. Based on scientific bottom-trawl surveys of...

Background: Contaminations from various exogenous sources are a common problem in next-generation sequencing. Another possible source of contaminating DNA are endogenous parasites. On the one hand, undiscovered contaminations of animal sequence assemblies may lead to erroneous interpretation of data; on the other hand, when identified, parasite-derived sequences may provide a valuable source of information. Results: Here we show that sequences deriving from apicomplexan parasites can be found in many animal genome and transcriptome projects, which...

Overfishing of large predatory fish populations has resulted in lasting restructurings of entire marine food webs worldwide, with serious socio-economic consequences. Fortunately, some degraded ecosystems show signs of recovery. A key challenge for ecosystem management is to anticipate the degree to which recovery is possible. By applying a statistical food-web model, using the Baltic Sea as a case study, we show that under current temperature and salinity conditions, complete recovery of this heavily altered ecosystem...

(1) Life-history trade-offs are considered a major driving force in the emergence of consistent behavioural differences (personality variation); but empirical tests are scarce. (2) We investigated links between a personality trait (escape response), life-history and state variables (growth rate, size and age at first reproduction, age-dependent reproductive rates, lifetime reproductive success, lifespan) in red and green colour morphs of clonal pea aphids, Acyrthosiphon pisum. Escape response (dropping/non-dropping off a plant upon a predatory attack) was...

Comparative research on food web structure has revealed generalities in trophic organization, produced simple models, and allowed assessment of robustness to species loss. These studies have mostly focused on free-living species. Recent research has suggested that inclusion of parasites alters structure. We assess whether such changes in network structure result from unique roles and traits of parasites or from changes to diversity and complexity. We analyzed seven highly resolved food webs that include metazoan parasite...

The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, comprises 29 populations of cave-adapted fish distributed across a vast karst region in northeastern Mexico. These populations have a complex evolutionary history, having descended from "old" and "young" ancestral surface-dwelling stocks that invaded the region ~8 MYa and ~2.1 MYa, respectively. This study investigates a set of captive, pigmented Astyanax cavefish collected from the Micos cave locality in 1970, in which albinism appeared over the last two decades. We combined...

This study investigated effects of microalgae (Rhodomonas baltica) and heterotrophic protists (Oxyrrhis marina) on the daily growth, activity, condition and feeding success of Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) larvae from hatch, through the end of the endogenous (yolk sac) period. Yolk sac larvae were reared in the presence and absence of microplankton and, each day, groups of larvae were provided access to copepods. Larvae reared with microalgae and protists exhibited precocious (2 days earlier) and ≥...

The apicomplexan order Haemosporida is a clade of unicellular blood parasites that infect a variety of reptilian, avian and mammalian hosts. Among them are the agents of human malaria, parasites of the genus Plasmodium, which pose a major threat to human health. Illuminating the evolutionary history of Haemosporida may help us in understanding their enormous biological diversity, as well as tracing the multiple host switches and associated acquisitions of novel life-history traits. However, the deep-level...

High-resolution information on climatic conditions is essential to many applications in environmental and ecological sciences. Here we present the CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas) data of downscaled model output temperature and precipitation estimates of the ERA-Interim climatic reanalysis to a high resolution of 30 arc sec. The temperature algorithm is based on statistical downscaling of atmospheric temperatures. The precipitation algorithm incorporates orographic predictors including wind fields, valley exposition, and...

Variation in life history traits within a population is caused by genetic, maternal and environmental factors. We explore high variability in development time, adult body weight and fecundity in females of the sexually-size dimorphic spider Trichonephila senegalensis. While their mothers originated from two habitats – strongly seasonal Namibia and mildly seasonal South Africa, we reared F1 females under standardized laboratory conditions. We find that a considerable part of the variability in recorded life-history traits is...