Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natural and anthropogenic stressors are spatiotemporally complex, having indirect effects on the composition and biomass of organisms at the base of a food web, and their availability and nutritional quality. Because basal organisms synthesise the biomolecules essential for metazoan growth and survival (i.e. basal resources), understanding the connections between basal resources and consumers [...]
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Life Sciences
1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how community functional composition and diversity beget [...]
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Mate choice in females is influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, including signal conspicuity, receiver body condition, and environmental properties. These factors interact in complex ways to modulate the choice of mates. Multimodal signals are more conspicuous than their unimodal components and therefore should elicit a stronger response. However, variations in female body condition [...]
Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Code review increases reliability and improves reproducibility of research. As such, code review is an inevitable step in software development and is common in fields such as computer science. However, despite its importance, code review is noticeably lacking in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is problematic as it facilitates the propagation of coding errors and a reduction in [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Opposite dynamics are behind natural selection and sexual selection. While the fittest survives in natural selection, the survivor will most likely be the luckiest when both dynamics are combined. As a result, chance has a greater impact on evolution.
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
The rapidly growing body of publicly available sequencing data for rare species and/or wild-caught samples is accelerating the need for detailed records of the samples used to generate datasets. Many already published datasets are unlikely to ever be reused, not due to problems with the data themselves, but due to their questionable or unverifiable origins. In this paper, I present iNaturalist – [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species’ environmental niches are conventionally modelled using coarse-grained macroclimate data. These data are known to deviate substantially from local, near-ground and proximal conditions (i.e., the microclimate), especially so below forests canopies. Here we aimed to assess the impact of using gridded microclimate data instead of gridded macroclimate data on the performance of species [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mutualistic interactions between plants and soil fungi, mycorrhizae, control carbon and nutrient fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Soil of ecosystems featuring a particular type of mycorrhiza exhibit specific properties across multiple dimensions of soil functioning. The knowledge about the impacts of mycorrhizal fungi on soil functioning accumulated so far, indicates that these impacts are of [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological differences between males and females lead to many differences in physiology, disease, and overall health. One of the most prominent disparities is in the number of germline mutations passed to offspring: human males transmit three times as many mutations as do females. While the classic explanation for this pattern invokes differences in post-puberty germline replication between the [...]
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Leaf size varies within and between species, and previous work has linked this variation to the environment and evolutionary history separately. However, many previous studies fail to interlink both factors and are often data limited. To address this, our study developed a new workflow using machine learning to automate the extraction of leaf traits (leaf area, largest in-circle area and leaf [...]
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genomic structural variation, genomic rearrangements and karyotype variants are important components on which evolution acts in addition to single nucleotide variants, which are the most common type of variant being studied since the rise of next generation sequencing. These variants have unique mutational mechanisms and evolutionary consequences compared to single nucleotide variants. Here we [...]
Published: 2023-05-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The basic concern of the general theory of evolution is to understand the entire evolution from the origin of life to the biological, technological, social, and economic structures of the present from a unified point of view and structure. The general theory of evolution can be seen as a comprehensive generalization and extension of Darwin's theory of evolution. It goes far beyond [...]
Published: 2023-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Reproductive performance in birds can be affected by both social environment and small-scale environmental heterogeneity via food abundance, availability of nesting sites, and predation risk. However, to date, the best studies of effects of microhabitat variation on avian populations have been on northern hemisphere passerines using nestboxes, where birds have limited control over nest sites [...]
Published: 2023-04-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
The strategies that animals employ to track resources through space and time are central to their ecology and reflect underlying ecosystem phenology. Deep-sea ecosystems represent Earth’s largest habitable space, yet ecosystem phenology and effective animal movement strategies in these systems are unknown. Analyzing seven-plus years of continuous population-level acoustic observations, we find [...]
Published: 2023-04-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background: The Cactaceae family displays remarkable diversity in the morphology of extrafloral nectaries (EFNs). Despite their taxonomic, ecological, and evolutionary significance, their anatomy and morphology are poorly understood. Questions: How are the morphological and anatomical attributes of extrafloral nectaries in Opuntia streptacantha and Ferocactus recurvus? Studied species: Opuntia [...]