Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-07-16
Subjects: Evolution, Life Sciences
When the mutation rate is high and/or the population size is large, recurrent mutation can lead to multiple, independently generated copies of the same beneficial allele spreading through the population. However, classical analyses of fixation probability and time assume that the mutation rate is low and therefore, that fixation and extinction of a beneficial allele occur faster than the [...]
Published: 2023-07-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hypothesis testing requires meaningful ways to quantify relevant biological phenomena and account for alternative mechanisms that could explain the same pattern. Researchers combine experiments, statistics, and indices to account for these confounding mechanisms. Key concepts in ecology and evolution, like niche breadth or fitness, can be represented by several indices, which often provide [...]
Published: 2023-07-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
In cooperatively breeding species, sexually mature individuals may delay natal dispersal and become subordinates, helping a dominant pair raise offspring. To understand how cooperative breeding evolved, it is important to determine the mechanisms leading to delayed dispersal. Adult sex ratio (ASR) variation may affect dispersal through limiting breeding vacancies available to the more abundant [...]
Published: 2023-07-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-07-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
• Woody biomass is a large carbon store in terrestrial ecosystems. In calculating biomass, tree stems are assumed to be solid structures; however, decomposer agents such as microbes and insects target heartwood in stems, causing internal wood decay which is poorly quantified. • We investigated internal stem damage across five sites in tropical Australia along a precipitation gradient. We [...]
Published: 2023-07-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
While urbanisation is often associated to a loss of biodiversity, non-native invasive animal species are strikingly successful in urban landscapes. As biological invasions are recognised to have detrimental environmental, social and economic impacts, extensive understanding of the interactions between invasive species and the abiotic and biotic environment is necessary for effective prevention [...]
Published: 2023-07-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Current climate change leads to an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts and to a decreased precipitation predictability. The few studies investigating plant evolutionary responses to contrasting predictability regimes showed that intrinsic precipitation predictability shapes plant phenotypic variation, drives evolution of phenotypic plasticity, and can vary in strength and [...]
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Botany, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The ongoing climate change is triggering plant community thermophilization. Such selection process towards warm-adapted species may also lead to biotic homogenization. The link between those two processes and the community dynamic driving them (colonization and extinction) remain unknow but are critical to understand community response under rapid environmental change. We used 12,764 pairs of [...]
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Color mutations may lead to the evolution and diversification of color phenotypes in animals. However, much of the research on this topic has been conducted on vertebrates. Here, I compile records of color mutations in freshwater crayfish (Decapoda: Astacidea). I found color mutations to be surprisingly common, with 103 documented occurrences. The overwhelming majority of these mutations resulted [...]
Published: 2023-07-02
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Collective humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem, one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be that we take inspiration from the [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Parasitoids have an exceptional lifestyle where development is spent on or in a single host insect, but the adults are free-living. Unlike parasites, parasitoids always kill their host. How parasitoids use such a limiting resource, particularly lipids, is important for their chances to survive and reproduce. Lipid metabolism in parasitoids has been of interest to researchers already since the 60s [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
The study of modularity and integration using Procrustes geometric morphometrics has become a prominent approach in evolutionary developmental biology. A most popular method is the ‘within a configuration’ approach, often used in combination with ‘high density’ morphometric data (i.e., large numbers of landmarks and semilandmarks). In 2019, I realized that this approach violates a basic [...]
Published: 2023-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity, including genetic diversity, is the foundation of ecosystems and the well-being of all organisms, including humans. Determining how the marine environment shapes genetic diversity and developing best practices to conserve it requires a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating genomic and environmental information. Seascape genetics and genomics combine spatially resolved [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Genetics, Life Sciences
Measuring genetic diversity of wild species using DNA-based data remains resource intensive and time-consuming for nearly all species. Yet, genetic assessments are needed for global conservation commitments including the Convention on Biological Diversity and for governments and managers to evaluate conservation progress and to prioritize species and populations to preserve and recover genetic [...]
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]