Aim Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) within natural plant communities can be large, influencing local ecological processes and dynamics. Here, we shed light on how ITV in vegetative and floral traits responds to large-scale abiotic and biotic gradients (i.e. climate and species richness). Specifically, we tested if associations of ITV with temperature, precipitation and species richness were consistent with any of from four hypotheses relating to stress-tolerance and competition. Furthermore, we estimated the degree of correlation...

1. Camera traps deployed in grids or stratified random designs are a well-established survey tool for wildlife but there has been little evaluation of study design parameters. 2. We used an empirical subsampling approach involving 2225 camera deployments run at 41 study areas around the world to evaluate three aspects of camera trap study design (number of sites, duration and season of sampling) and their influence on the estimation of three ecological metrics (species richness,...

People who are more socially integrated or have higher socio-economic status live longer. Recent studies in nonhuman primates show striking convergences with this human pattern: female primates with more social partners, stronger social bonds or higher dominance rank all lead longer lives. However, it remains unclear whether social environments also predict survival in male nonhuman primates, as it does in men. This gap persists because, in most primates, males disperse among social groups, resulting in...

Large brains are a defining feature of primates, as is a clear allometric trend between body mass and brain size. However, important questions on the macroevolution of brain shape in primates remain unanswered. Here we address two: (i), does the relationship between the brain size and its shape follow allometric trends and (ii), is this relationship consistent over evolutionary time? We employ three-dimensional geometric morphometrics and phylogenetic comparative methods to answer these questions, based on...

Firemaster 550 (FM550) is a flame retardant (FR) mixture which has become one of the most commonly used FRs in household items such as foam-based furniture and baby products. Because this mixture readily leaches from products, contamination of the environment and human tissues is widespread. Prior work by us and others has reported sex-specific behavioral deficits in rodents and zebrafish following early life exposure. In an effort to understand the mechanisms by which these behavioral...

As coral populations decline across the Caribbean, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the forces that inhibit coral survivorship and recovery. Predation by corallivores, such as the short coral snail Coralliophila abbreviata,are one threat to the health of reefs worldwide, but understanding of the factors controlling corallivore populations, and therefore corallivore predation pressure, remains limited. To examine the extent to which bottom-up (i.e., coral prey) and top-down (i.e., predators) forces relate to C. abbreviata...

Objectives: To estimate the cost of HPV-based screening through Community health campaigns (CHCs) and home-based testing. Setting: Community health campaigns (CHCs) and home-based testing in six communities in rural western Kenya. Participants: CHCs and home-based screening reached 2297 and 1002 women aged 25 to 65 years respectively. Outcome measures: Outcome measures were overall cost per woman screened achieved through the CHCs and home-based testing, and the cost per woman for each activity comprising the screening...

In humans and other long-lived species, harsh conditions in early life often lead to profound differences in adult life expectancy. In response, natural selection is expected to accelerate the timing and pace of reproduction in individuals who experience some forms of early life adversity. However, the adaptive benefits of reproductive acceleration following early adversity remain untested. Here we test a recent version of this theory, the internal predictive adaptive response (iPAR) model, by assessing for...

Two key knowledge gaps currently limit the development of more predictive and general models of pathogen transmission: (1) the physiological basis of heterogeneity in host contribution to pathogen transmission (reservoir potential) remains poorly understood, and (2) a general means of integrating the ecological dynamics of host communities has yet to emerge. If the traits responsible for differences in reservoir potential also modulate host community dynamics, these traits could be used to predict pathogen transmission as...

Predicting species’ range shifts under future climate is a central goal of conservation ecology. Studying populations within and beyond multiple species’ current ranges can help identify whether demographic responses to climate change exhibit directionality, indicative of range shifts, and whether responses are uniform across a suite of species. We quantified the demographic responses of six native perennial prairie species planted within and, for two species, beyond their northern range limits to a three-year experimental manipulation...

Sensory systems are predicted to be adapted to the perception of important stimuli, such as signals used in communication. Prior work has shown that female zebra finches perceive the carotenoid-based orange-red coloration of male beaks—a mate choice signal—categorically. Specifically, females exhibited an increased ability to discriminate between colors from opposite sides of a perceptual category boundary than equally-different colors from the same side of the boundary. The Bengalese finch, an Estrildid finch related to the...

No endemic Madagascar animal with body mass >10 kg survived a relatively recent wave of extinction on the island. From morphological and isotopic analyses of skeletal ‘subfossil’ remains we can reconstruct some of the biology and behavioral ecology of giant lemurs (primates; up to ~160 kg), elephant birds (up to ~860 kg), and other extraordinary Malagasy megafauna that survived well into the past millennium. Yet much about the evolutionary biology of these now extinct species...

Objective: To investigate whether sex and race differences exist in dementia risk associated with TBI among older Veterans. Materials and Methods: Using Fine-Gray regression models, we investigated incident dementia risk with TBI exposure by sex and race. Results: After excluding baseline prevalent dementia, the final sample (all Veterans 55+ diagnosed with TBI during the 2001-2015 study period and a random sample of all Veterans receiving Veterans Health Administration care) included nearly one million Veterans (4.3%...

Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with potential consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The changes that characterize urban ecology – including landscape transformation, modified diets, and shifts in community composition – can either increase or decrease susceptibility and exposure to parasites. We used a meta-analytic approach to systematically assess differences in endoparasitism between...

Lichens of the Ramalina siliquosa complex dominate seashore cliffs in Europe and Southeast Asia, but their taxonomy has been vigorously debated for over a century. On many cliffs, they exhibit a bewildering zonation of chemotypes that resembles the classic zonation of organisms that occupy the littoral zone below. Do the chemotypes represent separate species, or infraspecific variation? To better understand the systematics of this group, sequences from four genetic loci (ITS, IGS RPB1 and RPB2)...

A number of empirical studies have concluded that reproductive interference, RI, contributes to parapatric species distributions or sexual exclusion. However, the possibility that divergent host-plant use in phytophagous insects is due to sexual exclusion has seldom been considered. Here we present evidence that RI is responsible for different host-plant use by two Pierid butterfly species, Pieris napi and P. melete . When a novel host species was introduced about 50 years ago, two Pierid butterfly...

Spatial gradients in population growth, such as across latitudinal or elevational gradients, are often assumed to primarily be driven by variation in climate, and are frequently used to infer species’ responses to climate change. Here, we use a novel demographic, mixed model approach to dissect the contributions of climate variables vs. other latitudinal or local site effects on spatiotemporal variation in population performance in three perennial bunchgrasses. For all three species, we find that performance...

Active restoration is becoming an increasingly important conservation intervention to counteract the degradation of marine coastal ecosystems. Understanding what has motivated the scientific community to research the restoration of marine coastal ecosystems and how restoration research projects are funded is essential if we want to scale-up restoration interventions to meaningful extents.Here, we systematically review and synthesize data to understand the motivations for research on the restoration of coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarsh, and oyster reefs....

This paper considers the case of a relatively large number of parallel columns that buckle simultaneously. The close proximity between columns results in the possibility of contact between adjacent columns as buckling proceeds, and this brings with it some interesting observations on load carrying capacity. Some experimental results verify the theoretical development based on the versatility of high-fidelity 3D-printing. The sensitive nature of initial geometric imperfections (slight lack of straightness) and load eccentricity strongly influence...

Invasive species represent excellent opportunities to study the evolutionary potential of traits important to success in novel environments. Although some ecologically-important traits have been identified in invasive species, little is typically known about the genetic mechanisms that underlie invasion success in non-model species. Here, we use a genome-wide association (GWAS) approach to identify the genetic basis of trait variation in the non-model, invasive, diffuse knapweed (Centaurea diffusa Lam. [Asteraceae]). To assist with this analysis, we...

Phenotypes respond to environments experienced directly by an individual, via phenotypic plasticity, or to the environment experienced by ancestors, via transgenerational environmental effects. The adaptive value of environmental effects depends not only on the strength and direction of the induced response, but also on how long the response persists within and across generations, and how stably it is expressed across environments that are encountered subsequently. Little is known about the genetic basis of those distinct...

Evolutionary innovations allow populations to colonize new ecological niches. We previously reported that aerobic growth on citrate (Cit+) evolved in an Escherichia coli population during adaptation to a minimal glucose medium containing citrate (DM25). Cit+ variants can also grow in citrate-only medium (DM0), a novel environment for E. coli. To study adaptation to this niche, we founded two sets of Cit+ populations and evolved them for 2500 generations in DM0 or DM25. The evolved lineages...

On 19 May 2018 a microburst caused 600 isolated forest gaps in a Costa Rican tropical forest. We surveyed fallen and standing trees within gaps to determine if certain variables are associated with treefalls. Our results highlight considerations for future research to understand the impacts of microbursts in tropical forests. Our results show that at the scale and locality of our study, treefall vulnerability to microbursts and characteristics of fall events are independent of the...

Malarial fever arises from the synchronous bursting of human red blood cells by the Plasmodium parasite. The released parasites re-infect neighboring red blood cells and undergo another asexual cycle of differentiation and proliferation for 48 hours, before again bursting synchronously. The synchrony of bursting is lost during in vitro culturing of the parasite outside the human body, presumably because the asexual cycle is no longer entrained by host-specific circadian cues. Therefore, most in vitro malaria...

While recombination is widely recognized to be a key modulator of numerous evolutionary phenomena, we have a poor understanding of how recombination rate itself varies and evolves within a species. Here, we performed a comprehensive study of recombination rate (rate of meiotic crossing over) in two natural populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura from Utah and Arizona, USA. We used an amplicon sequencing approach to obtain high-quality genotypes in approximately 8000 individual backcrossed offspring (17 mapping populations...