Epidermal cells of leaves are diverse: tabular pavement cells, trichomes, and stomatal complexes. Pavement cells from the monocot Zea mays (maize) and the eudicot Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) have highly undulate anticlinal walls. The molecular basis for generating these undulating margins has been extensively investigated in these species. This has led to two assumptions: first, that particular plant lineages are characterized by particular pavement cell shapes; and second, that undulatory cell shapes are common enough to...

1.There is growing interest in understanding the functional outcomes of species interactions in ecological networks. For many mutualistic networks, including pollination and seed dispersal networks, interactions are generally sampled by recording animal foraging visits to plants. However, these visits may not reflect actual pollination or seed dispersal events, despite these typically being the ecological processes of interest. 2.Frugivorous animals can act as seed dispersers, by swallowing entire fruits and dispersing their seeds, or as pulp...

Tropical forest degradation is a global environmental issue. In degraded forests, seedling recruitment of canopy trees is vital for forest regeneration and recovery. We investigated how selective logging, a pervasive driver of tropical forest degradation, impacts canopy tree seedling recruitment, focusing on an endemic dipterocarp Dryobalanops lanceolata in Sabah, Borneo. During a mast-fruiting event in intensively logged and nearby unlogged forest, we examined four stages of the seedling recruitment process: seed production, seed predation, and...

In social mole-rats, breeding females are larger and more elongated than nonbreeding female helpers. The status-related morphological divergence is thought to arise from modifications of skeletal growth following the death or removal of the previous breeder and the transition of their successors from a nonbreeding to a breeding role. However, it is not clear what changes in growth are involved, whether they are stimulated by the relaxation of reproductive suppression or by changes in breeding...

Fast directional growth is a necessity for the young seedling; after germination, it needs to quickly penetrate the soil to begin its autotrophic life. In most dicot plants, this rapid escape is due to the anisotropic elongation of the hypocotyl, the columnar organ between the root and the shoot meristems. Anisotropic growth is common in plant organs and is canonically attributed to cell wall anisotropy produced by oriented cellulose fibers. Recently, a mechanism based on...

1. Several devastating forest pathogens are suspected or known to have entered the UK through imported planting material. The nursery industry is a key business of the tree trade network. Variability in demand for trees makes it difficult for nursery owners to predict how many trees to produce in their nursery. When in any given year, the demand for trees is larger than the production, nursery owners buy trees from foreign sources to match market...

Local adaption through ecological niche specialization can lead to genetic structure between and within populations. In the Northeast Pacific, killer whales (Orcinus orca) of the same population have uniform specialized diets that are non-overlapping with other sympatric, genetically divergent and socially isolated killer whale ecotypes. However, killer whales in Iceland show intra-population variation of isotopic niches and observed movement patterns: some individuals appear to specialise on herring and follow it year-round while others feed upon...

The Americas were the last inhabitable continents to be occupied by humans, with a growing multidisciplinary consensus for entry 15-25 thousand years ago (kya) from northeast Asia via the former Beringia land bridge. Autosomal DNA analyses have dated the separation of Native American ancestors from the Asian gene pool to 23 kya or later, and mtDNA analyses to ~25 kya, followed by isolation (‘Beringian Standstill’) for 2.4-9 ky and then a rapid expansion throughout the...

We tested whether the early-life environment can influence the extent of individual plasticity in a life history trait. We asked: can the early-life environment explain why, in response to the same adult environmental cue, some individuals invest more than others in current reproduction? And can it additionally explain why investment in current reproduction trades off against survival in some individuals, but is positively correlated with survival in others? We addressed these questions using the burying...

The human birth canal shows a tight fit with the size of the neonate, which can lead to obstetric complications. This is not the case in other apes, and has been explained as the outcome of conflicting evolutionary pressures for bipedal locomotion and parturition of a highly-encephalised fetus. Despite the suggested evolutionary constraints on the female pelvis, we show that women are, in fact, extremely variable in the shape of the bony birth canal, with...

Social complexity arises from the formation of social relationships like social bonds and dominance hierarchies. In turn, these aspects may be affected by the degree of fission-fusion dynamics, i.e. changes in group size and composition over time. Whilst fission-fusion dynamics has been studied in mammals, birds have received comparably little attention, despite some species having equally complex social lives. Here, we investigated the influence of environmental factors on aspects of fission-fusion dynamics in a free-ranging...

Substrates of most transport proteins have not been identified, limiting our understanding of their role in physiology and disease. Traditional identification methods use transport assays with radioactive compounds, but they are technically challenging and many compounds are unavailable in radioactive form or are prohibitively expensive, precluding large-scale trials. Here, we present a high-throughput screening method that can identify candidate substrates from libraries of unlabeled compounds. The assay is based on the principle that transport proteins...

The evolutionary loss of sexual traits is widely predicted. Because sexual signals can arise from the coupling of specialised motor activity with morphological structures, disruption to a single component could lead to overall loss of function. Opportunities to observe this process and characterise any remaining signal components are rare, but could provide insight into the mechanisms, indirect costs, and evolutionary consequences of signal loss. We investigated the recent evolutionary loss of a long-range acoustic sexual...

1.Since its recent invasion of the European and American continents, the spotted wing Drosophila Drosophila suzukii has become a burden of the fruit industry. Armed with a highly sclerotized ovipositor, females can lay eggs in a wider variety of ripening and healthy fruits than other Drosophila species. Economic losses due to Drosophila suzukii reach millions of dollars annually and methods to control natural populations in the field mainly rely on the use of chemical pesticides....

Theory suggests females should optimize resource allocation across reproductive bouts to maximize lifetime reproduction, balancing current and future reproductive efforts according to physiological state and projected survival and reproduction. Tests of these ideas focus on long-lived vertebrates: few measure age-related reproductive output in iteroparous invertebrates, or partition reserves between those allocated to offspring versus mothers. We investigated how maternal age, and environmental and physiological factors influence reproductive investment in wild tsetse, Glossina pallidipes Austen and...

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...

Species traits are thought to predict feeding specialisation and the vulnerability of a species to extinctions of interaction partners, but the context in which a species evolved and currently inhabits may also matter. Notably, the predictive power of traits may require that traits evolved to fit interaction partners. Furthermore, local abiotic and biotic conditions may be important. On islands, for instance, specialised and vulnerable species are predicted to be found mainly in mountains, whereas species...

The evolution of cooperation and social behaviour is often studied in isolation from the ecology of organisms. Yet, the selective environment under which individuals evolve is much more complex in nature, consisting of ecological and abiotic interactions in addition to social ones. Here we measured the life-history costs of cooperative chemical defence in a gregarious social herbivore, Diprion pini pine sawfly larvae, and how these costs vary under different ecological conditions. We ran a rearing...

Linking intraspecific and interspecific divergence is an important challenge in speciation research. X chromosomes are expected to evolve faster than autosomes and disproportionately contribute to reproductive barriers, and comparing genetic variation on X and autosomal markers within and between species can elucidate evolutionary processes that shape genome variation. We performed RADseq on a 16-population transect of two closely-related Australian cricket species, Teleogryllus commodus and T. oceanicus, covering allopatry and sympatry. This classic study system for...

On warm sunny days female hoverflies are often observed feeding from a wide range of wild and cultivated flowers. In doing so, hoverflies serve a vital role as alternative pollinators, and suggested to be the most important after bees and bumblebees. Unless the flower hoverflies are feeding from is large, they do not readily share the space with other insects, but instead opt to leave. We have used high-speed videography followed by 3D reconstruction of...

The increase in demand for shark meat and fins has placed shark populations worldwide under high fishing pressure. In the Arabian region, the Spot-tail shark Carcharhinus sorrah and the Blacktip shark Carcharhinus limbatus are among the most exploited species. In this study we investigated the population genetic structure of C. sorrah (n= 327) along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula and of C. limbatus (n= 525) along the Arabian coasts, Pakistan and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa...

A unique characteristic of mammals is a vertebral column with anatomically distinct regions, but when and how this trait evolved remains unknown. Here we reconstruct vertebral regions and their morphological disparity in the extinct forerunners of mammals, the non-mammalian synapsids, to elucidate the evolution of mammalian axial differentiation. Mapping patterns of regionalization and disparity (heterogeneity) across amniotes reveals that both traits increased during synapsid evolution. However, the onset of regionalization predates increased heterogeneity. Based on...

The multi-stress environment of high altitude has been associated with growth deficits in humans, particularly in zeugopod elements (forearm, lower leg). This is consistent with the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, which has been observed in Andeans, but has yet to be tested in other high altitude populations. In Himalayan populations, other factors, such as cold stress, may shape limb proportions. The current study investigated whether relative upper limb proportions of Himalayan adults (n=254) differ between highland...

Tapasin and TAPBPR are known to perform peptide editing on major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC I) molecules, however, the precise molecular mechanism(s) involved in this process remain largely enigmatic. Here, using immunopeptidomics in combination with novel cell-based assays that assess TAPBPR-mediate peptide exchange, we reveal a critical role for the K22-D35 loop of TAPBPR in mediating peptide exchange on MHC I. We identify a specific leucine within this loop that enables TAPBPR to facilitate...

Temperatures recorded 5cm above the forest floor in a gridded design (1 to 13m distance) within three, 1 hectare forest plots in Sabah, Borneo. The dataset also includes air temperature data from a nearby weather station at the same temporal resolution, and spatially-interpolated measurements of topography and canopy structure in each forest plot at a 1m resolution. iButton temperature measurement 5cm above the forest floor in gridded design (1-13m distance) within three 1-ha forest plots...