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Analysing a compilation of planktonic foraminifera assemblage time series covering the past 24,000 years, from the last ice age to the current warm period, the authors find that responses to warming were highly heterogeneous leading to the emergence of novel assemblages and possibly new ecological interactions.
In the Sahel region of West Africa, An. coluzzii mosquitoes appear to survive the dry season locally, but the relative contribution of this subpopulation to the persistence of the species in the Sahel has remained unknown. Here the authors use stable isotope tracking to determine the fraction of mosquitoes that undergo aestivation, a state of dormancy that allows them to persist through the dry season and maintain yearly malaria transmission.
Analysing a long-term tracking dataset of migrating mule deer, the authors show that the expansion of natural gas energy infrastructure over 14 years along a migratory corridor changes deer behaviour and reduces by more than 38% their ability to keep pace with spring vegetation green-up.
There are many open questions about biogeochemical function in peatlands. Here, the authors investigate the nitrogen cycle of tropical peatlands, finding that a surprisingly high fraction of nitrous oxide production is abiotic and that denitrification is a coupled abiotic-biotic process.
Using individual transcriptomes of two ant species, the authors show that caste differentiation is canalized from early development and identify key regulatory genes for the development of ant caste phenotypes.
A comparison of fish community data with reef coral and macroalgae cover at several sites around Polynesia over 11 years and spanning disturbance events suggests that fish community diversity has only minimal influence on coral dynamics, including recovery from disturbance.
Quantifying changing climatic effects on ecosystem productivity and human spatiotemporal distributions during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Iberia, the authors find evidence that the hiatus between Neanderthal and modern human cultural complexes in North Atlantic Iberia and the longer persistence of Neanderthals in southern latitudes had an ecological cause.
Fossil calibrations, a relative clade age calibration (informed by horizontal gene transfer) and new phylogenomic methods for mapping gene family origins resolve tracheophytes (vascular plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants) as monophyletic sister groups that diverged during the Cambrian, 515–494 million years ago. The early evolution of both groups, but particularly that of bryophytes, was characterized by major gene content change.
In realistic high-dimensional fitness landscapes of RNA secondary structure, protein tertiary structure and protein complexes, fitness peaks can be easily reached from any starting point without traversing fitness valleys.
A model of how local relatedness changes with age fits empirical patterns from seven group-living mammal species and reveals that patterns differ between the sexes and the potential behavioural consequences of these changes.
The authors analyse hundreds of animal and human footprints spanning at least 8,000 years at Formby on the Irish Sea coast of Britain. In the absence of conventional faunal records, the footprints document long-term changes in large mammal diversity and human activity during the Holocene.
Machine learning is used to predict extinction risk for 1,381 palm species, allowing identification of priority regions for palm conservation and cases where substitution with non-threatened species could provide products for human use.
Analysing >6,000 plant species from plots across the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the authors show that plant diversity consistently stabilizes community abundance across spatial scales and broad ecoclimatic domains, with the strength of the stabilizing effect increasing with scale.
Iron–sulfur (Fe–S) clusters are cofactors essential for life. Combining large-scale phylogenomic analyses with biochemical validation, the authors identify two ancestral minimal Fe–S cluster biogenesis systems and show that they originated before Earth oxygenation.
A series of behavioural, electrophysiological and chemical assays are used to attempt to detect long-range sex pheromones involved in species-specific male swarm recognition by Anopheles female mosquitoes, but no evidence is found.
Differences in a non-coding enhancer region of the HOXDB locus underlie the differences between stickleback species in dorsal spine length and number. These differences include single-nucleotide polymorphisms, deletions and transposable element insertions.
Studying all amino acid substitutions in the yeast cytosine deaminase Fcy1, the target of the antifungal 5-FC, the authors show a sharp trade-off between 5-FC resistance and growth sustained by cytosine deamination.
The authors develop a theoretical method to reduce the complex dynamics of a mutualistic system to a single dynamical equation, which is then used to estimate and compare the distances to a potential tipping point across systems with scaled recovery rates.
The timescale over which ecosystem functions rely on biodiversity is not well characterized. Analysing pollination of two different crops by wild bees, the authors show that a greater number of species are needed to provide the same threshold pollination service as temporal scale increases.
Tracking the behaviour of normal versus microbiome-free honeybees in experimental colonies, the authors show that gut microbiota colonization was associated with an increase in the rate and specificity of social interactions among bees and higher abundances of brain metabolites linked to these interactions.