Page 11 of 13
The transition from water to land was a key event in the evolution of vertebrates that occurred over a period of 15–20 million years towards the end of the Devonian. Tetrapods, including all land-living verteb...
Plant defense strategy is usually a result of trade-offs between growth and differentiation (i.e. Optimal Defense Theory – ODT, Growth Differentiation Balance hypothesis – GDB, Plant Apparency Theory – PAT). I...
Many animals live in environments where different types of predators pose a permanent threat and call for predator specific strategies. When foraging, animals have to balance the competing needs of food and sa...
Ninety-one rodent plague epidemics have occurred in Lianghe county, Yunnan Province, China, between 1990 and 2006. This study aimed to identify predictors for the presence and abundance of small mammals in hou...
Many studies investigating the ecosystem effects of global climate change have focused on arctic ecosystems because the Arctic is expected to undergo the earliest and most pronounced changes in response to inc...
At depths below 10 m, reefs are dominated by blue-green light because seawater selectively absorbs the longer, 'red' wavelengths beyond 600 nm from the downwelling sunlight. Consequently, the visual pigments o...
A time series of 4 consecutive years of measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in the Scheldt estuarine plume is used here to estimate net ecosystem production (NEP).
As a cross-boundary resource subsidy, spawning salmon can strongly affect consumer and ecosystem ecology. Here we examine whether this marine resource can influence a terrestrial wolf-deer (Canis lupus-Odocoileus...
Understanding the dispersal and genetic structure of invasive insects across islands is important for designing management plans that are appropriate at spatial and temporal scales. For invasive parasites, pop...
In the androdioecious nematode Caenorhabditis elegans virtually all progeny produced by hermaphrodite self-fertilization is hermaphrodite while 50% of the progeny that results from cross-fertilization by a male i...
Tobler's first law of geography, 'Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things' also applies to biological systems as illustrated by a general and strong occur...
All animals thus far studied sleep, but little is known about the ecological factors that generate differences in sleep characteristics across species, such as total sleep duration or division of sleep into mu...
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is highly endangered and only about 7% of the original forest remains, most of which consists of fragments of secondary forest. Small mammals in the Atlantic Forest have different...
Climate change is particularly pronounced in the High Arctic and a better understanding of the repercussions on ecological processes like herbivory, predation and pollination is needed. Arthropods play an impo...
Meiofauna – multicellular animals captured between sieve size 45 μm and 1000 μm – are a fundamental component of terrestrial, and marine benthic ecosystems, forming an integral element of food webs, and playin...
Plotless density estimators are those that are based on distance measures rather than counts per unit area (quadrats or plots) to estimate the density of some usually stationary event, e.g. burrow openings, da...
Considerable variation of life cycle duration in given insect species has been frequently recorded. Splitting of populations into cohorts with different life cycle lengths may occur, sometimes even between sib...
To improve the understanding of consequences of climate change for annual plant communities, I used a detailed, grid-based model that simulates the effect of daily rainfall variability on individual plants in ...
Anopheles darlingi is the most important malaria vector in the Neotropics. An understanding of A. darlingi's population structure and contemporary gene flow patterns is necessary if vector populations are to be s...
Group formation and food sharing in animals may reduce variance in resource supply to breeding individuals. For some species it has thus been interpreted as a mechanism of risk avoidance. However, in many grou...
Competitive displacement of a weakly virulent pathogen strain by a more virulent strain is one route to disease emergence. However the mechanisms by which pathogens compete for access to hosts are poorly under...
According to the classical model of Macevicz and Oster, annual eusocial insects should show a clear dichotomous "bang-bang" strategy of resource allocation; colony fitness is maximised when a period of pure co...
Antarctic terrestrial vegetation is subject to one of the most extreme climates on Earth. Currently, parts of Antarctica are one of the fastest warming regions on the planet. During 3 growing seasons, we inves...
Free-ranging narwhals (Monodon monoceros) were instrumented in Admiralty Inlet, Canada with both satellite tags to study migration and stock separation and short-term, high-resolution digital archival tags to exp...
There is much debate concerning which ecological constraints are the most limiting factors to seedling recruitment in disturbed communities. We provide the first comparison between selective herbivory and plan...
Behavioural syndromes, i.e. consistent individual differences in behaviours that are correlated across different functional contexts, are a challenge to evolutionary reasoning because individuals should adapt ...
Pheromones play an important role for mate finding and courtship in many insects. In species where males are the signaling sex, females are expected to choose among potential mates with regard to the emitter's...
Biodiversity offsets are conservation projects used mainly by business to counterbalance the environmental impacts of their operations, with the aim of achieving a net neutral or even beneficial outcome for bi...
Changes in land surface phenology are of major importance to the understanding of the impact of recent and future climate changes in the Arctic. This paper presents an extensive study from Zackenberg Ecologica...
Stomach contents of 131 specimens of five elasmobranch species (Mustelus lunulatus, Dasyatis longa, Rhinobatos leucorhynchus, Raja velezi and Zapteryx xyster) caught in the central fishing zone in the Pacific Oce...
In most regions of the world human influences on the distribution of flora and fauna predate complete biotic surveys. In some cases this challenges our ability to discriminate native from introduced species. T...
The endemic seagrass Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile colonizes soft bottoms producing highly productive meadows that play a crucial role in coastal ecosystems dynamics. Human activities and natural events are resp...
Correspondence regarding Wilting A, Fischer F, Bakar SA, Linsenmair KE: Clouded leopards, the secretive top-carnivore of South-East Asian rainforests: their distribution, status and conservation needs in Sabah, M...
Acacia tortilis is a keystone species across arid ecosystems in Africa and the Middle East. Yet, its life-history, longevity and growth are poorly known, and consequently ongoing changes in tree populations canno...
Determining the relative contribution of intrinsic and extrinsic factors to fluctuations in population size, trends and demographic composition is analytically complex. It is often only possible to examine the...
Giant Galápagos tortoises on the island of Española have been the focus of an intensive captive breeding-repatriation programme for over 35 years that saved the taxon from extinction. However, analysis of 118 ...
We investigated the feeding ecology and habitat use of 32 harbour porpoises by-caught in 4 localities along the Scandinavian coast from the North Sea to the Barents Sea using time-integrative markers: stable i...
Phages are thought to play a crucial role in the maintenance of diversity in natural bacterial communities. Theory suggests that phages impose density dependent regulation on bacterial populations, preventing ...
We conducted Geographic Information System (GIS) habitat analyses for lesser prairie-chicken (LPCH, Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) conservation planning. The 876,799 ha study area included most of the occupied habit...
In Europe the mountain hare (Lepus timidus) exists in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of the Alps and in Eastern Europe, but not in Denmark. Interspecific hybridization has been demonstrated between...
The continued depletion of tropical rainforests and fragmentation of natural habitats has led to significant ecological changes which place most top carnivores under heavy pressure. Various methods have been u...
To understand variation in resistance to parasites within host populations, researchers have examined conditions under which immunity is induced and/or is costly. Both host sex and age have been found to influ...
Morus boninensis, is an endemic plant of the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands of Japan and is categorized as "critically endangered" in the Japanese red data book. However, little information is available about its ecol...
P. avium, a pioneer tree species that colonizes early forest successional stages, is assumed to require an effective strategy allowing stably repeatable rounds of local establishment, dispersal and local extincti...
Within semi-closed areas like the Mediterranean Sea, anthropic wastes tend to concentrate in the environment. Metals, in particular, are known to persist in the environment and can affect human health due to a...
Marine turtles deposit their eggs on tropical or subtropical beaches during discrete nesting seasons that span several months. The number and distribution of nests laid during a nesting season provide vital in...
Major changes in climate have been observed in the Arctic and climate models predict further amplification of the enhanced greenhouse effect at high-latitudes leading to increased warming. We propose that warm...
Network analyses of plant-animal interactions hold valuable biological information. They are often used to quantify the degree of specialization between partners, but usually based on qualitative indices such ...
One of the key tools for determining the social structure of wild and endangered primates is the ability to sex DNA from small amounts of non-invasive samples that are likely to include highly degraded DNA. Tr...
The fertilization success in sperm competition in externally fertilizing fish depends on number and quality of sperm. The time delay between sequential ejaculations may further influence the outcome of sperm c...
