We present The Odonate Phenotypic Database (OPD): an online data resource of dragonfly and damselfly phenotypes (Insecta: Odonata). Odonata is a relatively small insect order that currently consists of about 6400 species belonging to 32 families. The database consists of a variety of morphological, life-history and behavioral traits, and biogeographical information collected from literature sources. We see taxon-specific phenotypic databases from Odonata and other organismal groups as becoming an increasing valuable resource in comparative studies....

Despite longstanding interest in the evolutionary origins and maintenance of vocal learning, we know relatively little about how social dynamics influence vocal learning processes in natural populations. The “social group membership” hypothesis proposes that socially learned calls evolved and are maintained as signals of group membership. However, in fission-fusion societies, individuals can interact in social groups across various social scales. For learned calls to signal group membership over multiple social scales, they must contain information...

In nest-building species, offspring survival and reproductive success of parental individuals are strongly influenced by nest quality. Thus, quantifying the influence of abiotic conditions on nest integrity is important to predict the effects of weather variability on the fitness of parental individuals. Here we investigated how rainfall affects nest integrity and how nest integrity influences males’ attractiveness and nest tenure. Our study species was the harvestman Quindina limbata, in which males build mud nests on...

Conflicts of interests between males and females over reproduction is a universal feature of sexually reproducing organisms and has driven the evolution of intersexual mimicry, mating behaviors and reproductive polymorphisms. Here we show how temperature drives pre-reproductive selection in a female colour polymorphic insect that is subject to strong sexual conflict. This species has three female colour morphs, one of which is a male mimic. This polymorphism is maintained by frequency-dependent sexual conflict caused by...

Recent studies have reported a consistent pattern of strong dominance of a small subset of tree species in Neotropical forests. These species have been called ‘hyperdominant’ at large geographical scales and ‘oligarchs’ at regional-landscape scales when being abundant and frequent. Forest community assembly is shaped by environmental factors and stochastic processes, but so far the contribution of oligarchic species to the variation of community composition (i.e. beta diversity) remains poorly known. To that end, we...