Background Secondary endosymbionts of aphids provide benefits to their hosts, but also impose costs such as reduced lifespan and reproductive output. The aphid Aphis fabae is host to different strains of the secondary endosymbiont Hamiltonella defensa, which encode different putative toxins. These strains have very different phenotypes: They reach different densities in the host, and the costs and benefits (protection against parasitoid wasps) they confer to the host vary strongly. Results We used RNA-Seq to...

Intergenerational effects, also known as parental effects in which the offspring phenotype is influenced by the parental phenotype, can occur in response to factors that occur not only in early but also in late parental life. However, little is known about how these parental life stage-specific environments interact with each other and with the offspring environment to influence offspring phenotypes, particularly in organisms that realize distinct niches across ontogeny. We examined the effects of parental...

Two seicmic detection arrays in the Vogtland swarm earthquake region.

Microplastics in soils have become an important threat for terrestrial systems as they may potentially alter the geochemical/biophysical soil environment and can interact with drought. As microplastics may affect soil water content, this could exacerbate the well-known negative effects of drought on ecosystem functionality. Thus, functions including litter decomposition, soil aggregation or those related with nutrient cycling can be altered. Despite this potential interaction, we know relatively little about how microplastics, under different soil water...

Trait variation among heterospecific and conspecific organisms may substantially affect community and food web dynamics. While the relevance of competition and feeding traits have been widely studied for different consumer species, studies on intraspecific differences are more scarce, partly owing to difficulties in distinguishing different clones of the same species. Here, we investigate how intraspecific trait variation affects the competition between the freshwater ciliates Euplotes octocarinatus and Coleps hirtus in a nitrogen-limited chemostat system. The...

Plant root systems induce biogeochemical patterns in the soil by respiration, water uptake and root exudation that can be measured with in-situ imaging techniques. Slab-shaped rhizoboxes represent the optimum design for 2D optical fluorescence imaging of pH and oxygen dynamics in the rhizosphere as well as measurement of soil water content by neutron radiography. However, quality of standard tomographic (3D) imaging of laterally extended samples suffers from insufficient neutron transmission over a significant angular range....

To predict how widely distributed species will perform under future climate change it is crucial to understand and reveal their underlying phylogenetics. However, detailed information about plant adaptation and its genetic basis and history remains scarce and especially widely distributed species receive little attention despite their putatively high adaptability. To examine the adaptation potential of a widely distributed species, we sampled the model plant Silene vulgaris across Europe. In a greenhouse experiment, we exposed the...

During June and July of 2017, wild bees were collected using color traps (blue, yellow and white pans) in small water bodies called kettle holes embedded in agricultural landscapes in the north of Germany. After all wild bees were identified to species level, from a subset of samples we measured the Intertegular distance ITD (distance between the wings) as body size and searched for functional traits regarding sociality (solitary, eusocial, parasitic) nesting type (below- or...

This PDS4 bundle collects all the operational data products produced by the Hayabusa2 TIR instrument.

Geographic variation of sexual selected male traits is common in animals. Female choice also varies geographically and several studies found female preference for local males, which is assumed to lead to local adaptation and therefore increases fitness. As females are the non-dispersing sex in most mammalian taxa, this preference for local males might be explained by learning of male characteristics. Studies on preference of females in female-dispersing species are lacking so far. To find out...

Aim: Separating the biotic and abiotic factors controlling species distributions has been a long-standing challenge in ecology and biogeography. Joint species distribution models (JSDMs) have emerged as a promising statistical framework towards this objective by simultaneously modeling the environmental responses of multiple species and approximating species associations based on patterns in their (co-)occurrences. However, the signature of biotic interactions should be most evident at fine spatial resolutions. Here, we test how the resolution of input...

1. Food web stability and resilience are at the heart of understanding the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Previous studies show that models of empirical food webs are substantially more stable than random ones, due to a few strong interactions embedded in a majority of weak interactions. Analyses of trophic interaction loops show that in empirical food webs the patterns in the interaction strengths prevent the occurrence of destabilizing heavy loops and thereby enhances resilience....

Although many plants are dispersed by wind and seeds can travel long distances across unsuitable matrix areas, a large proportion relies on co-evolved zoochorous seed dispersal to connect populations in isolated habitat islands. Particularly in agricultural landscapes, where remaining habitat patches are often very small and highly isolated, mobile linkers as zoochorous seed dispersers are critical for the population dynamics of numerous plant species. However, knowledge about the quali- or quantification of such mobile link...

Populations adapt to novel environmental conditions by genetic changes or phenotypic plasticity. Plastic responses are generally faster and can buffer fitness losses under variable conditions. Plasticity is typically modelled as random noise and linear reaction norms that assume simple one-to-one genotype-phenotype maps and no limits to the phenotypic response. Most studies on plasticity have focused on its effect on population viability. However, it is not clear, whether the advantage of plasticity depends solely on environmental...

Woody species’ requirements and environmental sensitivity change from seedlings to adults, a process referred to as ontogenetic shift. Such shifts can be increased by climate change. To assess the changes in the difference of temperature experienced by seedlings and adults in the context of climate change, it is essential to have reliable climatic data over long periods that capture the thermal conditions experienced by the individuals throughout their life cycle. Here we used a unique...

Models are useful tools for understanding and predicting ecological patterns and processes. Under ongoing climate and biodiversity change, they can greatly facilitate decision-making in conservation and restoration and help designing adequate management strategies for an uncertain future. Here, we review the use of spatially explicit models for decision support and identify key gaps in current modelling in conservation and restoration. Of 650 reviewed publications, 217 publications had a clear management application and were included in...

Biodiversity decline causes a loss of functional diversity, which threatens ecosystems through a dangerous feedback loop: this loss may hamper ecosystems' ability to buffer environmental changes, leading to further biodiversity losses. In this context, the increasing frequency of human-induced excessive loading of nutrients causes major problems in aquatic systems. Previous studies investigating how functional diversity influences the response of food webs to disturbances have mainly considered systems with at most two functionally diverse trophic levels....

Foraging by consumers acts as a biotic filtering mechanism for biodiversity at the trophic level of resources. Variation in foraging behaviour have cascading effects on abundance, diversity, and functional trait composition of the community of resource species. Here we propose diversity at giving-up density (DivGUD), when foragers quit exploring a patch, as a novel concept and simple measure to quantify these effects at multiple spatial scales. In experimental landscapes, patch residency of wild rodents decreased...

Steller’s sea cow, an extinct sirenian and one of the largest Quaternary mammals, was described by Georg Steller in 1741 and eradicated by humans within 27 years. Here, we complement Steller’s descriptions with paleogenomic data from 12 individuals. We identified convergent evolution between Steller’s sea cow and cetaceans but not extant sirenians, suggesting a role of several genes in adaptation to cold environments. Among these are inactivations of lipoxygenase genes, which in humans and mouse...