Volume 1 Issue 6, June 2017

The theme of UN World Wildlife Day 2017 was ‘Listen to the young voices’. We talk to Mya-Rose Craig (@BirdgirlUK), a young naturalist, environmentalist and writer, who was appointed European Green Capital Ambassador for her home town of Bristol, UK, in 2015.

Large-scale invasive species control initiatives are motivated by laudable desires for native species recovery and economic benefits, but they are not without risk. Management interventions and policies should include evidence-based risk–benefit assessment and mitigation planning.

Newly discovered filamentous fossils from 2.4-billion-year-old oceanic lavas suggest that eukaryotes of possible fungal affinity are much older than previously thought.

Destruction of seafloor habitat following a submarine volcanic eruption facilitates construction and recolonization by an intriguing new bacterial species.

Female aggression is enhanced after mating. Genetic manipulation and behavioural observation show that the receipt of sperm, and a seminal fluid protein, enhances female Drosophila aggression towards other females.

The evolutionary history of life and the history of the planet itself are closely entwined. This Perspective looks at the sources of energy — geochemical, sunlight, oxygen, flesh and fire — that have shaped this inter-relationship and the course of evolution.

Reproducibility starts with having a transparent and streamlined workflow. Here, the authors describe how they achieved this using open data tools for the collaborative Ocean Health Index project.

Five laws derived from fossil data describe the relationships between species extinction and longevity, species richness, origination rates, extinction rates and diversification. These laws are crucial to the study of evolution and ecology.

Origin of genes in non-coding DNA is assumed to be rare because random combinations of DNA are not expected to be functional. Here, the authors show that random peptides can affect fitness in E. coli, which suggests that random parts of the genome have the potential to become functional.

2.4-billion-year-old South African basalts preserve filamentous fossils similar to fungi or an as-yet-unknown eukaryote taxon.

Following a submarine volcanic eruption that cleared the local seafloor, a new microbial genus and species of bacterial trichomes, named Thiolava veneris, colonized the substrate 130 m below sea level.

Protein-coding genes can originate de novo from non-coding sequences. Here, the authors show that young genes have exaggerated gene-like structural properties, which suggests that new genes arise from sequences that are preadapted to avoid toxicity.

Mutations provide the variation that drives evolution, yet their effects on fitness remain poorly understood. Mutations in the essential enzyme adenylate kinase (Adk) of E. coli affect multiple phases of population growth.

Variable plant–soil biotic interactions influence the migration and fragmentation of tree species, and models will need to incorporate soil parameters to more accurately predict future species distributions.

Accounting for inter- and intraspecies evolutionary relationships is important for conservation planning, but rarely considered in practice. A new framework identifies priority conservation areas accounting for evolutionary diversity.

Larval dispersal of clownfish and butterflyfish across a 10,000 km² area was tracked over 2 years, a large enough scale to inform the design of marine reserve networks and test their performance.

Spatial indicators of ecosystem-critical transitions have so far only been confirmed in the lab. Here, the authors show that increasing recovery length provides a spatial signature of critical slowing down in a natural intertidal community.

In a semi-naturalistic ‘Metatron’ experiment, a rise of 2–3 °C causes a reduction in gut microbiome diversity of over one-third in an ectotherm, the common lizard (Zootoca vivipara).

Complex ecological networks are likely to be disrupted as species shift in response to environmental change. A simulation model shows that the level of dispersal determines whether species associations within networks are maintained.

Reproduction incurs a physiological cost as a result of evolutionary fitness optimization. In male Drosophila, key reproductive costs are shown to be a result of perceiving female pheromones, and the act of mating reverses the costs.

Female aggression towards other females is common in nature, yet we don’t know what triggers such behaviour. Here, the authors show that, in fruit flies, female aggression after mating is strongly stimulated by sperm.

Sessile communities may support high species richness, despite competition for space. Here, the authors use fungal competition assays to show that intransitive competition can overwhelm pairwise competitive exclusion to facilitate biodiversity.

Stable isotope and community faunal analysis of early hominid environments in the lower Awash Valley (Ethiopia) and Turkana Basin (Kenya/Ethiopia) reveal environmental change and divergence coincident with the emergence of the genus Homo (approx. 2.8 Ma).

Environmental heterogeneity in three-spined stickleback pairs contributes to deviations from parallel evolution, but genomic targets of selection were more parallel between environmentally similar pairs, suggestive of a continuum of parallel evolution.