Gestural displays are incorporated into the signaling repertoire of numerous animal species. These displays range from complex signals that involve impressive and challenging maneuvers, to simpler displays or no gesture at all. The factors that drive this evolution remain largely unclear, and we therefore investigate this issue in New World blackbirds by testing how factors related to a species’ geographical distribution and social mating system predict macro-evolutionary patterns of display elaboration. We report that species...

1) Many species perform social displays that incorporate complex body movements. However, the reason why such exaggerated behavioral signals evolve in the first place is unclear. 2) Recent work posits that physical displays arise in part because they showcase an animal’s motor skill—that is, the ability to produce challenging motor acts with great coordination, precision, and/or speed. Support for this idea is largely correlational, with few studies attempting to manipulate metrics of motor skill to...

Premise of the Study—Phylogenetic support has been difficult to evaluate within the green plant tree of life partly due to a lack of specificity between conflicted versus poorly informed branches. As datasets continue to expand in both breadth and depth, new support measures are needed that are more efficient and informative. Methods— We describe the Quartet Sampling (QS) method, a quartet-based evaluation system that synthesizes several phylogenetic and genomic analytical approaches. QS characterizes discordance in...

Pyrodiversity, which describes fire variability over space and time, is believed to increase habitat heterogeneity and thereby promote biodiversity. However, to date there is no standardised metric for quantifying pyrodiversity, and so broad geographic patterns and drivers of pyrodiversity remain unexplored. We present the first generalizable method to quantify pyrodiversity, and use it to address the fundamental questions of what drives pyrodiversity, which fire attributes constrain pyrodiversity under different conditions, and whether pyrodiversity is spatial...

Tropical tree species distributions are determined by a wide range of biotic and abiotic factors, including topography and hydrology. Tropical peat swamp forests (TPSFs) are characterized in part by small-scale variations in topography (‘hummocks’ and ‘hollows’) that create distinct microhabitats and thus may contribute to niche diversification among TPSF tree species. Using tree elevations calibrated to daily peat water levels collected using a data logger and a permutation test, we evaluated topographical microhabitat preferences for...

Much of the research on cannabinoids (CBs) has focused on their effects at the molecular and synaptic level. However, the effects of CBs on the dynamics of neural circuits remains poorly understood. This study aims to disentangle the effects of CBs on the functional dynamics of the hippocampal Schaffer collateral synapse by using data-driven nonparametric modeling. Multi-unit activity was recorded from rats doing an working memory task in control sessions and under the influence of...