Standardized data on large-scale and long-term patterns of species richness are critical for understanding the consequences of natural and anthropogenic changes in the environment. The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) is one of the largest and most widely used sources of such data, but so far, little is known about the degree to which BBS data provide accurate estimates of regional richness. Here we test this question by comparing estimates of regional richness based...

Biological soil crusts (hereafter, biocrusts) are communities of microorganisms that regulate key ecosystem processes such as water distribution, soil erosion, and nutrient cycling in drylands worldwide. The nature of biocrust function can be influenced by multiple environmental factors, including climatic conditions (e.g., precipitation), interactions with plants, and anthropogenic disturbances. Animal regulation of biocrust function has received less research attention, focusing primarily on livestock trampling and to a much lesser extent on biocrust consumption by mesofauna....

Background: The developmental fates of offspring have the potential to be influenced by the identity of their care-givers and by the nature of the care that they receive. In animals that exhibit both parental and alloparental care, such as the annually eusocial insects, the influence of care-giver identity can be directly assessed to yield mechanistic and evolutionary insights into the origins and elaboration of brood care. Here, we performed a comparative investigation of maternal and...

Aims: Primary biomass production is a fundamental process for ecosystem functioning. Yet, little is known on the mechanisms driving temporal stability of biomass production in annual plant communities, particularly in communities subjected to highly variable environments and undergoing temporal changes in species composition. We aimed to disentangle the relative importance of biomass production, species diversity, dominance and asynchrony of species fluctuations as drivers of biomass stability in Mediterranean and semiarid annual plant communities. Location: Mediterranean...

Plant breeders and conservationists depend on knowledge about the genetic variation of their species of interest. Pisum fulvum, a wild relative of domesticated pea, has attracted attention as a genetic resource for crop improvement, yet little information about its diversity in the wild has been published hitherto. We sampled 15 populations of P. fulvum from Israeli natural habitats and conducted genotyping by sequencing to analyse their genetic diversity and adaptive state. We also attempted to...

Bitter taste facilitates the detection of potentially harmful substances and is perceived via bitter taste receptors (TAS2Rs) expressed on the tongue and oral cavity in vertebrates. In primates, TAS2R16 specifically recognizes β-glucosides, which are important in cyanogenic plants’ use of cyanide as a feeding deterrent. In this study, we performed cell-based functional assays for investigating the sensitivity of TAS2R16 to β-glucosides in three species of bamboo lemurs (Prolemur simus, Hapalemur aureus, and H. griseus), which...

A revision of the rhinocerotid material from the Negev (Israel), dating back to the early Miocene (MN3 in the European Mammal Biochronology), highlights the presence of Brachypotherium and a taxon close to Gaindatherium in the Levantine Corridor. A juvenile mandible, investigated using CT scanning, displays morphologically distinct characters consistent with B. cf. B. snowi rather than with other Eurasian representatives of this genus. Some postcranial remains from the Negev, such as a humerus, display features...

The discovery of extremophiles helped enable the development of groundbreaking technology such as polymerase chain reaction. Temperature variation is often an essential step of these technology platforms, but the effect of temperature on the error rate of polymerases from different origins is under-explored. We applied high-throughput sequencing to profile the error rates of DNA polymerases from psychrophilic, mesophilic, and thermophilic origins with single-molecule resolution. We found that reaction temperature substantially increases substitution and deletion error...

1. Protein quantification is a routine procedure in ecological studies despite the inherent limitations of well-acknowledged protein determination methods which have been largely overlooked by ecologists. Thus, we want to bridge this knowledge gap, in hopes of improving the way ecologists quantify proteins and interpret findings. 2. We surveyed the ecological literature to determine how and why ecologists quantify proteins. To determine whether different quantification methods produce comparable results across taxa, and between populations of...

Human activities shape resources available to wild animals, impacting diet and likely altering their microbiota and overall health. We examined drivers shaping microbiota profiles of common cranes (Grus grus) in agricultural habitats by comparing gut microbiota and crane movement patterns (GPS-tracking) over three periods of their migratory cycle, and by analyzing the effect of artificially-supplemented food provided as part of a crane-agriculture management program. We sampled fecal droppings in Russia (non-supplemented, pre-migration) and in Israel...

An inclusion complex between water-soluble p-sulfocalix[n]arene (Cn, n = 4, 6, 8) and the chromophore trans-4-[4-(dimethylamino)styryl]-1-methylpyridinium-p-toluenesulfonate (D) formed the basis for a highly sensitive sensor for the selective detection of neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh). Formation of the [Cn·D] complex (Ka = ∼105 M-1) was accompanied by a drastic increase (up to 20−60-fold) in the chromophore relative quantum yield and by a large hypsochromic shift of the emission band maximum. The observed optical effects are fully reversible: ...

Long-branch attraction is a systematic artifact that results in erroneous groupings of fast-evolving taxa. The combination of short, deep internodes in tandem with LBA artifacts has produced empirically intractable parts of the Tree of Life. One such group is the arthropod subphylum Chelicerata, whose backbone phylogeny has remained unstable despite improvements in phylogenetic methods and genome-scale datasets. Pseudoscorpion placement is particularly variable across datasets and analytical frameworks, with this group either clustering with other long-branch...

When a transmission hotspot for an environmentally persistent pathogen establishes in otherwise high-quality habitat, the disease may exert a strong impact on a host population. However, fluctuating environmental conditions lead to heterogeneity in habitat quality and animal habitat preference, which may interrupt the overlap between selected and risky habitats. We evaluated spatiotemporal patterns in anthrax mortalities in a plains zebra (Equus quagga) population in Etosha National Park, Namibia, incorporating remote-sensing and host telemetry data. A...