Past reproductive interactions among incompletely isolated species may leave behind a trail of introgressed alleles, shedding light on historical range movements. Betula pubescens is a widespread native tetraploid tree species in Britain, occupying habitats intermediate to those of its native diploid relatives, B. pendula and B. nana. Genotyping 1134 trees from the three species at 12 microsatellite loci we found evidence of introgression from both diploid species into B. pubescens, despite the ploidy difference. Surprisingly,...

Differences in body size, echolocation call frequency, and location may result in diet partitioning among bat species. Comparisons among island populations are one way to evaluate these competing hypotheses. We conducted a species-level diet analysis of three Rhinolophus and one Hipposideros species on the Philippine islands of Cebu, Bohol, and Siquijor. We identified 655 prey (MOTUs) in the guano from 77 individual bats. There was a high degree of overlap among species’ diets despite differences...

1.Pervasive and accelerating changes to ecosystems due to human activities remain major sources of uncertainty in predicting the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. Understanding which biotic interactions within natural multitrophic communities are threatened or augmented by invasions of non-native species in the context of other environmental pressures is needed for effective management. 2.We used multivariate autoregressive models with detailed time-series data from largely freshwater and brackish regions of the upper San Francisco Estuary to...

Phylogeographic reconstructions of co-distributed taxa can help reveal the interplay between abiotic factors, such as altitude and climate, and species-specific attributes, in shaping patterns of population genetic structure. Recent studies also demonstrate the value of both range-wide sampling and species distribution modeling (SDM) in comparative phylogeography. Here we combine these approaches to study the population histories of four phylogenetically-related forest-dependent bat species. All are endemic to the mountainous island of Taiwan but show differences in...

Many organisms have intimate associations with beneficial microbes acquired from the environment. These host–symbiont associations can be specific and stable, but they are prone to lower partner specificity and more partner-switching than vertically transmitted mutualisms. To investigate partner specificity in an environmentally acquired insect symbiosis, we used 16S rRNA gene and multilocus sequencing to survey the bacterial population in the bacteria-harbouring organ (crypts) of 49 individuals across four sympatric broad-headed bug species (Alydus calcaratus, A....