Swarms of the migratory desert locust can extend over several hundred square kilometres, and starvation compels this ancient pest to devour everything in its path. Theory suggests that gregarious behaviour benefits foraging efficiency over a wide range of spatial food distributions. However, despite the importance of identifying the processes by which swarms locate and select feeding sites to predict their progression, the role of social cohesion during foraging remains elusive. We investigated the evidence accumulation...

AbstractThe transition to self-compatibility from self-incompatibility is often associated with high rates of self-fertilization, which can restrict gene flow among populations and cause reproductive isolation of self-compatible (SC) lineages. Secondary contact between SC and self-incompatible (SI) lineages might re-establish gene flow if SC lineages remain capable of outcrossing. By contrast, intrinsic features of SC plants that reinforce high rates of self-fertilization could maintain evolutionary divergence between lineages. Arabidopsis lyrata subsp. lyrata is characterized by multiple...

Additional file 7: Table S2. Table of relative abundances of Synechococcus MAGs in Ircinia, inferred via CoverM.

Additional file 8: Table S3. Table of genes and domains that are significantly enriched or depleted in Ircinia, and which are plotted in Fig. 2.

The hindered diffusion model postulates that the movement of a signaling molecule through an embryo is affected by tissue geometry and binding-mediated hindrance, but these effects have not been directly demonstrated in vivo. Here, we visualize extracellular movement and binding of individual molecules of the activator-inhibitor signaling pair Nodal and Lefty in live developing zebrafish embryos using reflected light-sheet microscopy. We observe that diffusion coefficients of molecules are high in extracellular cavities, whereas mobility is...

Understanding variation in abundance within species’ ranges is fundamental for ecological and evolutionary theory and applied conservation science. The abundant-center model provides a general hypothesis based on basic ecological principles and macroscale biogeographic patterns: abundance should peak near the center of a species’ range, where environmental conditions are most favorable, and decline towards the periphery. Despite longstanding influence in ecological thinking, consistent support for the ubiquity of abundant-center distributions remains elusive, and recent assessments have...

1. Numerous studies have highlighted the role of nutrient availability and fluctuations therein for invasion success of alien plants. Others also highlighted the role of herbivores in invasion success. However, how herbivory and the level and fluctuations in nutrient availability interact in driving alien plant invasion into native communities remains largely unexplored. 2. We grew eight invasive alien species as target species in pot-mesocosms with five different synthetic native communities in a three-factorial design with...

Whole genome sequences are beginning to revolutionise our understanding of phylogenetic relationships. Yet, even whole genome sequences can fail to resolve the evolutionary history of the most rapidly radiating lineages, where incomplete lineage sorting, standing genetic variation, introgression, and other factors obscure the phylogenetic history of the group. To overcome such challenges, one emerging strategy is to integrate results across different methods. Most such approaches have been implemented on reduced representation genomic datasets, but whole...

Droughts affect plant communities, but their impacts may be mediated by soil biota. Soil communities may ameliorate drought stress, and droughts may leave legacies of altered soil communities that may affect future plant growth. However, it is not yet understood which groups of soil biota in particular affect plant performance under drought, nor which groups contribute to drought-legacy effects on future plant growth. We hypothesized that increasing soil-community complexity ameliorates drought stress and that drought-legacy...

Functional traits are frequently proposed to determine the invasiveness of alien species. However, few empirical studies have directly manipulated functional traits and tested their importance in the invasion success of alien species into native plant communities, particularly under global change. We manipulated clonal integration (a key clonal functional trait) of four alien clonal plants by severing inter-ramet connections or keeping them intact, and simulated their invasion into native plant communities with two levels of species...

Additional file 2: R documentation of data selection and chronotype estimations.

Anthropogenic disturbances are widely recognized for their far-reaching consequences on the survival and reproduction of wildlife, but we understand comparatively little about their effects on the social lives of group-living animals. Here we examined these short-term changes in affiliative behavior as part of a long-term study on a human-tolerant and socially flexible population of California ground squirrels (Otospermophilus beecheyi). We used social network analysis to examine short-term changes in affiliative behavior and individual consistency in...

Vision is critical for most vertebrates, including fish. One challenge that aquatic habitats pose is the high variability in spectral properties depending on depth, turbidity and composition of the water body. By altering opsin gene expression and chromophore usage, cichlid fish modulate visual sensitivities to maximize sensory input from the available light in their respective habitat. Thyroid hormone (TH) has been proposed to play a role in governing adaptive diversification in visual sensitivity in Nicaraguan...

The need to make fast decisions under risky and uncertain conditions is a widespread problem in the natural world. While there has been extensive work on how individual organisms dynamically modify their behavior to respond appropriately to changing environmental conditions (and how this is encoded in the brain), we know remarkably little about the corresponding aspects of collective information processing in animal groups. For example, many groups appear to show increased “sensitivity” in the presence...

CSV files used for model in the paper "Downstream effects of low insect abundance over meadows on bats" bei Melina Dietzer and co-authors

The evolution of sex chromosomes and their differentiation from autosomes is a major event during genome evolution that happened many times in several lineages. The repeated evolution and lability of sex-determination mechanisms in fishes makes this a well-suited system to test for general and predictable patterns in evolution. According to current theory, differentiation is triggered by the suppression of recombination following the evolution of a new master-sex determining gene. However, the molecular mechanisms that establish...

Biological invasions are key to understanding ecological processes that determine the formation of novel interactions. Alien species can negatively impact floral visitation to native species, but native species may also facilitate early establishment of closely related alien species by providing a preadapted pollinator community. We tested whether floral visitation to alien species depended on phylogenetic relatedness and floral similarity to native species. In a field experiment, we simulated the early stages of an invasion by...

Additional file 10: Data File S1. Fasta-formatted CSGs found in bacterial symbionts of Ircinia.

Additional file 8: Table S3. Table of genes and domains that are significantly enriched or depleted in Ircinia, and which are plotted in Fig. 2.

Additional file 3: R documentation of changepoint functions.

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Additional file 3: R documentation of changepoint functions.

Although many studies have tested the direct effects of drought on alien plant invasion, less is known about whether drought affects alien plant invasion indirectly via interactions of plants with other groups of organisms such as soil mesofauna. To test for such indirect effects, we grew single plants of nine naturalized alien target species in pot-mesocosms with a community of five native grassland species under four combinations of two drought (well-watered vs drought) and two...

The human-caused proliferation of cyanobacteria severely impacts consumers in freshwater ecosystems. Toxicity is often singled out as the sole trait to which consumers can adapt, even though cyanobacteria are not necessarily toxic and the lack of nutritionally critical sterols in cyanobacteria is known to impair consumers. We studied the relative significance of toxicity and dietary sterol deficiency in driving the evolution of grazer resistance to cyanobacteria in a large lake with a well-documented history of...

Migration patterns in birds vary in space and time. Spatial patterns include chain, leap frog, and telescopic migration. Temporal patterns such as migration duration, number and duration of stopovers may vary according to breeding latitude, sex and season. This study aimed to verify these patterns in a long-distance migrant, the Eurasian curlew (Numenius arquata arquata), and to provide a synopsis of spatio-temporal migration patterns in this species of concern throughout the East Atlantic Flyway. We...