In 1898, Herbert and Alice Walter started a 5-year survey of birds in Lincoln Park, – the largest park in Chicago, IL – and summarized their data in an urban birding field guide, ‘Wild Birds in City Parks’. Twenty-nine years later, William Dreuth compared the relative frequency of species between the Walter’s study to their own 5-year Lincoln Park survey. Between 2012 and 2015, we replicated these surveys to investigate a century of bird diversity...

Rhithropanopeus harrisii is a common estuarine crab native to the East and Gulf Coasts of North America. Here, it is found along a broad range of salinities, spanning from ~1 PSU to ~25 PSU along estuarine gradients. As part of a larger study on the species' potential use of low-salinity refuges from parasitism, we tested for differences in gene expression with salinity using crabs from three distinct estuarine reaches along the Pamlico River in North...

By shuffling biogeographic distributions, biological invasions can both disrupt long-standing associations between hosts and parasites and establish new ones. This creates natural experiments with which to study the ecology and evolution of host-parasite interactions. In estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico, the white-fingered mud crab (Rhithropanopeus harrisii) is infected by a native parasitic barnacle Loxothylacus panopaei (Rhizocephala), which manipulates host physiology and behavior. In the 1960s, L. panopaei was introduced to the Chesapeake Bay and...

Emerging infectious diseases are spreading at unprecedented rates and affecting wildlife worldwide, with particularly strong effects on islands. Since the introduction of avian malaria to Hawaii a century ago, the disease has contributed to the decline and extinction of several endemic Hawaiian honeycreeper species. At low elevation, where avian malaria is prevalent, Hawaii Amakihi (Chlorodrepanis virens) honeycreeper populations have experienced strong selection by the disease and have evolved increased malaria resilience, the ability to recover...

Interval timing is a fundamental component of action, and is interestingly susceptible to motor-related temporal distortions. Several experiments have shown that temporal expansion and compression can occur in systematic ways with modifications of movement direction, speed, and length. These studies have largely shown that movement biases temporal estimates, but have primarily considered self-modulated movement only. However, real-world encounters often include situations in which movement is restricted or perturbed by environmental factors. Thus, in the following...

Vertebrates confronted with challenging environments often experience an increase in circulating glucocorticoids, which result in morphological, physiological, and behavioral changes that promote survival. However, chronically elevated glucocorticoids can suppress immunity, which may increase susceptibility to disease. Since the introduction of avian malaria to Hawaii a century ago, low elevation populations of Hawaii Amakihi (Chlorodrepanis virens) have undergone strong selection by avian malaria and evolved increased resilience (the ability to recover from infection), while populations at...