Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-01-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Social insects are known for reproductive and behavioral division of labor, but little attention has been paid to metabolic forms of division of labor. Metabolic division of labor is the partitioning of complementary metabolic tasks between individuals within the colony, and it is widespread in social insects. Here we pinpoint trophallaxis, trophic eggs and cannibalism as the most well-studied [...]
Published: 2023-01-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Traditionally, dominant breeders have been considered able to control other individuals’ reproduction in multi-member groups with high variance in reproductive success/reproductive skew (e.g., forced sterility on subordinate conspecifics in eusocial animals; suppression of sex change in sequential hermaphrodites). These actions are typically presented as active impositions by reproductively [...]
Published: 2023-01-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Meta-analysis is a quantitative way of synthesizing results from multiple studies to obtain reliable evidence of an intervention or phenomenon. Indeed, an increasing number of meta-analyses are conducted in environmental sciences, and resulting meta-analytic evidence is often used in environmental policies and decision-making. We conducted a survey of recent meta-analyses in environmental [...]
Published: 2023-01-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Although meta-analysis has become an essential tool in ecology and evolution, reporting of meta-analytic results can still be much improved. To aid this, we have introduced the orchard plot, which presents not only overall estimates and their confidence intervals but also shows corresponding heterogeneity (as prediction intervals) and individual effect sizes. 2. Here, we have added [...]
Published: 2023-01-03
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Surveys assessing attitudes and values about the environment can help predict human behavior towards wildlife and develop effective conservation goals alongside local communities. Southern Alabama is a hotspot for biodiversity and endemism in the United States and is in need of studies to protect its wildlife. Land and wildlife management practices in Alabama have moved from indigenous-led [...]
Published: 2023-01-02
Subjects: Biology, Economics, Geography, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Psychology, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humans have inundated the environment worldwide with antimicrobials for about one century, giving selective advantage to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Therefore, antibiotic resistance has become a public health problem responsible for increased mortality, and extended hospital stays because the efficacy of antibiotics has diminished. Hospitals and other clinical settings have implemented [...]
Published: 2022-12-30
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Automated feeders have long fed mice, livestock, and poultry, but are incapable of feeding zoo animals such as gorillas. Gorilla food, consisting of cut vegetables and fruits, is too large to be dispensed by automated feeders. Instead gorillas are manually at a set time and location, which decreases the exercise and enrichment that accompanies their natural foraging. We designed and built [...]
Published: 2022-12-23
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Venice lagoon social-ecological system is characterized by a strong relationship between the natural environment and human activities. This is especially noticeable in the aquaculture and hunting reserves of the lagoon, locally known as valli da pesca. Previous works about Ecosystem Services (ESs) in the Venice lagoon focused on the so-called “open lagoon”, overlooking the role of the valli [...]
Published: 2022-12-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
In wild bird populations, the structure of vegetation around nest-sites can influence the risk of predation of dependent young offspring, generating selection for breeding birds to choose nest-sites with vegetation characteristics associated with lower predation rates. However, for researchers, vegetation structure can be difficult to quantify objectively in the field, which might explain why [...]
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology
Exchange of genetic material through sexual reproduction or horizontal gene transfer is ubiquitous in nature. Among the few outliers that rarely recombine and mainly evolve by *de novo* mutation are a group of deadly bacterial pathogens, including the causative agents of leprosy, plague, typhoid, and tuberculosis. The interplay of evolutionary processes is poorly understood in these organisms. [...]
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Identification of the key biotic and abiotic drivers within food webs is important for understanding species abundance changes in ecosystems, particularly across ecotones where there may be strong variation in interaction strengths. Using structural equation models and four decades of integrated data from the San Francisco Estuary, we investigated the relative effects of top-down, bottom-up, and [...]
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
In 2020 the Beachie Creek Fire burned a large area of forest in the northern Oregon Cascade Range including public and private land and much of the Opal Creek Wilderness. We compiled a baseline data set from various sources of the lichens known to occur before the fire within this area. These data are presented as an annotated species checklist documenting two hundred and eighty species. Euopsis [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Large carnivores such as the jaguar (Panthera onca) are particularly susceptible to population decline and local extinction as a result of habitat loss. Here, we report on the long-term monitoring of a local jaguar population in a mixed land use area in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia from March 2017 to December 2019. We recorded 15 jaguar individuals and four reproduction events (five offspring [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Numerous studies have demonstrated that individuals within a species will consistently vary between one another in behavioural traits. A prominent adaptive explanation for such ‘animal personalities’ relates to an individual’s intrinsic state driving and/or being driven by behaviour. Telomeres – the protective caps at the end of chromosomes which exist in most organisms – have been proposed as a [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the last decade and a half, advances in genetic sequencing technologies have revolutionized systematics, transforming the field as studying morphological characters; a few genetic markers have given way to genomic data sets in the phylogenomic era. A plethora of molecular phylogenetic studies on many taxonomic groups have come about, converging on, or refuting prevailing morphology or [...]