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Genomic analyses show that two independent fusions involving the same chromosome altered recombination patterns and contributed to reproductive isolation between two Pristionchus nematodes.
Analysing 20,000 plant-pollinator interactions over 3 yr in a fragmented island ecosystem, the authors show that forest edges benefit community diversity and network robustness to extinction in the face of declining forest area.
The authors resurveyed a previously sampled set of mountain transects on five continents, showing that the ranges of non-native plant species have shifted upslope in most locations in just 5–10 years.
Adaptation to new environments often involves changes in gene expression. This study shows a role of ancestral gene expression plasticity in heavy metal adaptation of two independent lineages of Silene uniflora.
The authors compiled body size data from mammal and bird museum collections in North America to show that intraspecific variation in body size, but not mean body size, has increased over time.
After assaying the cognitive ability of juvenile pheasants and releasing them into a new landscape, the authors show that pheasants with better memory developed larger home range sizes and more successfully avoided predation at the edges of the home range.
The authors report a specialized obsidian handaxe workshop at the site of Simbiro III in Ethiopia, suggesting that hominins more than 1.2 million years ago took advantage of opportunities provided by changing environmental conditions.
Using an algorithm for ancestral genome reconstruction, the authors present 624 ancestral genomes for vertebrates, plants, fungi, metazoans and protists and reconstruct the chromosomal rearrangement history of all major vertebrate clades.
Trace element ratios (strontium/calcium) in teeth of Pleistocene Homo erectus and fossil orangutans (Pongo sp.) reveal different dietary strategies and contrasting adaptations to seasonal food resources. H. erectus but not Pongo sp. was able to buffer against seasonal food oscillations by exploiting more varied food sources.
The authors generate a genome-wide dataset of 102 individuals who lived in Crete, the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands between the Neolithic and the Iron Age, identifying high levels of biological and cultural connectedness within the ancient Aegean.
Single-cell RNA sequencing of testes from young and old male Drosophila, together with genomic sequencing of somatic tissues of the same flies, shows distinct mutational biases in old and young flies and suggests late spermatogenesis as a source of evolutionary innovation.
Analysing subtropical forest soils from a 2,000 km transect across China, the authors show that temperature fluctuations can induce the thermal adaptation of microbial respiration, in contrast to findings derived from mean temperature alone.
Linking plant traits to long-term pollen records over the Holocene, the authors track changes in functional diversity over the last 12,000 years in southeast Australia and use this to predict vegetation changes under future climate change.
Three complementary decomposition experiments across a climatic gradient in Europe, representing 110 different tree species mixtures in 194 forest plots, reveals that macroclimate is a dominant control on plant litter decomposition through both direct and indirect effects.
Analysing a global dataset of >24,000 observations of coral reef benthic cover, the authors show that high macroalgal cover is largely restricted to the Western Atlantic, where alongside the Central Pacific there have also been marked declines in coral cover since the late 1990s.
In a widespread sampling campaign across urban soils, the authors find that soil biodiversity, but not plant diversity, is positively related to multiple ecosystem functions in urban environments.
Combining modelling of living human participants and chimpanzees with analysis of fossil hominin trackways, the authors distinguish between the earliest evidence of modern human-like bipedal kinematics and earlier hominin precursors.
In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment across ten islands in the Indian Ocean, invasive black rats disrupted nutrients provided by seabirds, leading to a coral reef fish having larger territories and investing less time in aggression than on rat-free islands.
The authors develop a new metric to measure the error-corrected convergence rate of protein evolution, together with a heuristic algorithm to detect signals of adaptive protein convergence.
Using synthetic human gut communities and computational modelling, the authors show that increasing the complexity of dietary carbohydrates reduces microbial growth, balances positive and negative interspecies interactions, and reduces community sensitivity to perturbations.