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Evidence is accumulating that telomere length is a good predictor of life expectancy, especially early in life, thus calling for determining the factors that affect telomere length at this stage. Here, we inve...
Deployment of cultivars with different resistance in mixtures is one means to manage plant diseases and prolong the life of resistance genes. One major concern in adopting mixtures is the development of ‘super...
The effective management and conservation of biodiversity is predicated on clearly defined conservation targets. Species number is frequently used as a metric for conservation prioritization and monitoring cha...
Theory suggests that biodiversity can act as a buffer against disturbances and environmental variability via two major mechanisms: Firstly, a stabilising effect by decreasing the temporal variance in ecosystem...
Movement behaviour can be influenced by a multitude of biotic and abiotic factors. Here, we investigate the speed of movement in relation to environmental and individual phenotypic properties in subadult commo...
Although inducible defences have been studied extensively, only little is known about how the presence of parasites might interfere with these anti-predator adaptations. Both parasites and predators are import...
The positive relationship between habitat area and species number is considered a fundamental rule in ecology. This relationship predicts that the link number of species interactions increases with habitat are...
A central question for ecologists is the extent to which anthropogenic disturbances (e.g. tourism) might impact wildlife and affect the systems under study. From a research perspective, identifying the effects of...
The life history strategy of a species can influence how populations of that species respond to environmental variation. In this study, we used a matrix modeling approach to examine how life history difference...
Kirtland’s warblers are the rarest songbird species in North America, rarity due in part to a reliance on early successional Jack Pine forests. Habitat loss due to fire suppression led to population declines t...
The outcome of male-male competition can be predicted from the relative fighting qualities of the opponents, which often depend on their age. In insects, freshly emerged and still sexually inactive males are m...
Intraguild predation (IGP) is common in nature, but its ecological role is still illusive. A number of studies have investigated a three species IGP module that consists of an intraguild predator, intraguild p...
Theory predicts a nonlinear response of dispersal evolution to habitat fragmentation. First, dispersal will be favoured in line with both decreasing area of habitat patches and increasing inter-patch distances...
Studies of host-parasite interactions have the potential to provide insights into the ecology of both organisms involved. We monitored the movement of sucking lice (Lemurpediculus verruculosus), parasites that re...
Disturbance is an important process structuring ecosystems worldwide and has long been thought to be a significant driver of diversity and dynamics. In forests, most studies of disturbance have focused on larg...
Most species of brown macroalgae recruit exclusively sexually. However, Fucus radicans, a dominant species in the northern Baltic Sea, recruits new attached thalli both sexually and asexually. The level of asexua...
The Andes-Amazon basin of Peru and Bolivia is one of the most data-poor, biologically rich, and rapidly changing areas of the world. Conservation scientists agree that this area hosts extremely high endemism, ...
Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, is a globally distributed zoonotic pathogen that continues to be a veterinary and human health problem in Central Asia. We used a database of anthrax outbreak l...
There are a growing number of genomes sequenced with tentative functions assigned to a large proportion of the individual genes. Model organisms in laboratory settings form the basis for the assignment of gene...
Social insects maintain the integrity of their societies by discriminating between colony members and foreigners through cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) signatures. Nevertheless, parasites frequently get access to...
Globally, forests cover nearly one third of the land area and they contain over 80% of terrestrial biodiversity. Both the extent and quality of forest habitat continue to decrease and the associated loss of bi...
To identify the determinants of invasiveness, comparisons of traits of invasive and native species are commonly performed. Invasiveness is generally linked to higher values of reproductive, physiological and g...
South America is one of the most species diverse continents in the world. Within South America diversity is not distributed evenly at both local and continental scales and this has led to the recognition of va...
Group coordination is one of the greatest challenges facing animals living in groups. Obligatory trade-offs faced by group members can potentially lead to phenomena at the group level such as the emergence of ...
The Svalbard endemic aphid Acyrthosiphon svalbardicum (Heikinheimo, 1968) is host specific to Dryas octopetala L. ssp octopetala (Rosaceae). It has been hypothesized that the aphid is present on those areas with ...
Sand fly saliva can drive the outcome of Leishmania infection in animal models, and salivary components have been postulated as vaccine candidates against leishmaniasis. In the sand fly Phlebotomus papatasi, natu...
Understanding the phenotypic consequences of interactions between arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) and their mosquito hosts has direct implications for predicting the evolution of these relationships and ...
Morphological data suggest that, unlike most other groups of marine organisms, scleractinian corals of the genus Stylophora are more diverse in the western Indian Ocean and in the Red Sea than in the central Indo...
Efficient division of reproductive labor is a crucial characteristic of social insects and underlies their ecological and evolutionary success. Despite of the harmonious appearance of insect societies, nestmat...
Predicting the geographic distribution of widespread species through modeling is problematic for several reasons including high rates of omission errors. One potential source of error for modeling widespread s...
The division of labor in social insect colonies involves transitions by workers from one task to another and is critical to the organization and ecological success of colonies. The differential regulation of g...
When a specimen belongs to a species not yet represented in DNA barcode reference libraries there is disagreement over the effectiveness of using sequence comparisons to assign the query accurately to a higher...
Patterns in the association of individuals can shed light on the underlying conditions and processes that shape societies. Here we characterize patterns of association in a population of wild Asian Elephants a...
A territory as a prerequisite for breeding limits the maximum number of breeders in a given area, and thus lowers the proportion of breeders if population size increases. However, some territorially breeding a...
Stable isotope ratios (13C/12C and 18O/16O) in fossil teeth and bone provide key archives for understanding the ecology of extinct horses during the Plio-Pleistocene in South America; however, what happened in ar...
Regular seasonal changes in prevalence of infectious diseases are often observed in nature, but the mechanisms are rarely understood. Empirical tests aiming at a better understanding of seasonal prevalence pat...
Parasites that manipulate host behavior can provide prominent examples of extended phenotypes: parasite genomes controlling host behavior. Here we focus on one of the most dramatic examples of behavioral manip...
Protected areas are the most common and important instrument for the conservation of biological diversity and are called for under the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity. Growing human population ...
Terabyte-scale collections of string-encoded data are expected from consortia efforts such as the Human Microbiome Project http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp
Science-based wildlife management relies on genetic information to infer population connectivity and identify conservation units. The most commonly used genetic marker for characterizing animal biodiversity an...
Natural communities are structured by intra-guild competition, predation or parasitism and the abiotic environment. We studied the relative importance of these factors in two host-social parasite ecosystems in...
Experiments from a range of ecosystems have shown that insectivorous birds are important in controlling the populations of their invertebrate prey. Here, we report on a large field experiment testing the hypot...
Understanding the effects of anthropogenically-driven changes in global temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide and biodiversity on the functionality of marine ecosystems is crucial for predicting and managing...
The Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, is a widespread invasive ant species that has successfully established in nearly all continents across the globe. Argentine ants are characterised by a social structure know...
A key challenge for conservation biologists is to determine the most appropriate demographic and genetic management strategies for wildlife populations threatened by disease. We explored this topic by examinin...
The genetic structure of populations can be influenced by geographic isolation (including physical distance) and ecology. We examined these effects in Leptopilina boulardi, a parasitoid of Drosophila of African o...
In colonially breeding birds, the ability to discriminate between individuals is often essential. During post-fledging care, parents have to recognize their own offspring among many other unrelated chicks in t...
Oxygen availability in aquatic habitats is a major environmental factor influencing the ecology, behaviour, and physiology of fishes. This study evaluates the contribution of source population and hypoxic accl...
Interference competition occurs when access to resources is negatively affected by the presence of other individuals. Within a species or population, this is known as mutual interference, and it is often model...
Intense consumer pressure strongly affects the structural organization and function of marine ecosystems, while also having a profound effect on the phenotype of both predator and prey. Allelochemicals produce...
