Natural and anthropogenic disasters have the capability to cause sudden extrinsic environmental changes and long-lasting perturbations including invasive species, species expansion, and influence evolution as selective pressures force adaption. Such disasters occurred on March 11th 2011, in Fukushima, Japan when an earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of a nuclear power plant all drastically reformed anthropogenic land use. Here, we demonstrate, using genetic data, how wild boar (Sus scrofa leucomystax) have persevered against these environmental changes, including...

Parechovirus A3 was first reported in 2004 and has been recognized as a causative agent of mild and severe infections in children. Since we first reported an outbreak of adult parechovirus A3-associated myalgia in Yamagata, Japan in 2008, this disease has since been recognized across Japan, but has not yet been reported from other countries. We analysed 19 cases of parechovirus A3 infections identified in Yamagata in 2019 to further clarify the epidemiology of this...

Nucleomorphs are relic endosymbiont nuclei so far found only in two algal groups, cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes, which have been studied to model the evolutionary process of integrating an endosymbiont alga into a host-governed plastid (organellogenesis). However, past studies suggested that DNA transfer from the endosymbiont to host nuclei had already ceased in both cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes, implying that the organellogenesis at the genetic level has been completed in the two systems. Moreover, we have yet...

Aim Studying clearly delineated populations in marine lakes, islands of sea, we investigate the interplay of habitat size, immigration, and priority effects in shaping marine population genetic structure. Location Marine lakes and coastal locations in Indonesia, Palau, Papua New-Guinea and Australia. Taxon Mussels (Mytillidae, Brachidontes spp.) Methods Populations were sampled from four coastal locations and 22 marine lakes of similar age (~8,000 years), yet differing in size (0.04 - 4.7 km2) and degree of connection...

Recently, many green plants forming Paris-type arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) have been suggested to receive fungal carbon (Giesemann et al. 2020b, 2021). Whereas the enrichment of natural abundance of heavy stable isotopes (particularly 13C) has been considered as strong evidence for this ‘partial mycoheterotrophy,’ we show our own data on isotopic abundances and mycorrhizal colonization in Japanese plants and argue that the 13C-enrichment may not always be the result of acquiring carbon from AM fungi.

Raw metabolome data from medaka larvae at five days post-hatching (dph). Hatching stage of medaka larvae were treated with normal feeding (fed), starvation (starved), Pank inhibitor (PI) and FAS inhibitor (C75) for five days. Water-soluble metabolites were extracted from the whole body and analyzed by CE-TOFMS, IC-FTMS and LC-MS/MS.

Colonies of social insects contain large amounts of resources often exploited by specialized social parasites. While some termite species host numerous parasitic arthropod species, called termitophiles, others host none. The reason for this large variability remains unknown. Here we report that the evolution of termitophily in rove beetles is linked to termite nesting strategies. We compared one-piece nesters, whose entire colony life is completed within a single wood piece, to foraging species, which exploit multiple...

Three major forest types in lowland Thailand and its adjacent parts in Southeast Asia are mixed deciduous forest (MDF), dry dipterocarp forest (DDF) and dry evergreen forest (DEF). We report the leaf physiology of canopy trees in these forests. The leaf mass-based photosynthetic rates (Amax), stomatal conductance (Gmax) and photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency were significantly different between the deciduous forests (MDF and DDF) and the evergreen forest (DEF). The canopy trees of MDF with thick,...

A serious disease of amphibians caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis was first found in Japan in December 2006 in imported pet frogs. This was the first report of chytridiomycosis in Asia. To assess the risk of pandemic chytridiomycosis to Japanese frogs, we surveyed the distribution of the fungus among captive and wild frog populations. We established a nested PCR assay that uses two pairs of PCR primers to amplify the internal transcribed spacer...

Despite the advantage of plant clonality in patchy environments, studies focusing on genet demography in relation to spatially heterogeneous environments remain scarce. Regeneration of bamboos in forest understoreys after synchronous die-off provides an opportunity for assessing how they come to proliferate across heterogeneous light environments. In a Japanese forest, we examined genet demography of a population of Sasa kurilensis over a 7-year period starting 10 years after die-off, shortly after which some genets began spreading...

Sexual conflict is a strong driver of evolution. The evolutionary outcomes of sexual conflict can, in turn, influence ecological processes within populations, e.g., demography. However, evidence for the latter hypothesis is scarce, especially in the wild. Here, we show that sexual conflict is associated with demographic processes determining population size in the ground beetle Carabus insulicola with elaborate male and female genitalia, based on individual- and population-level analyses. We found that sexually antagonistic selection can...

Drought-induced tree death has become a serious problem in global forest ecosystems. Two nonexclusive hypotheses, hydraulic failure and carbon starvation, have been proposed to explain tree die-offs. To clarify the mechanisms, we investigated the physiological processes of drought-induced tree death in saplings with contrasting Huber values (sapwood area/total leaf area). First, hydraulic failure and reduced respiration were found in the initial process of tree decline, and in the last stage carbon starvation leaded to tree...

Parechovirus A3 was first reported in 2004 and has been recognized as a causative agent of mild and severe infections in children. Since we first reported an outbreak of adult parechovirus A3-associated myalgia in Yamagata, Japan in 2008, this disease has since been recognized across Japan, but has not yet been reported from other countries. We analysed 19 cases of parechovirus A3 infections identified in Yamagata in 2019 to further clarify the epidemiology of this...