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The authors show how a resistance index based on biotic assemblage resemblance can predict the spread of invasive bird species without having to estimate their ecological niche.
Although tumours evolve in a Darwinian fashion, they do not undergo sexual reproduction. The authors show experimentally and using mathematical modelling that spontaneous fusion between cancer cells allows recombination between clones and the possibility of exploring larger areas of the adaptive landscape.
Ecosystems that exhibit long periods of transient dynamics pose particular challenges for management because state shifts can occur in the absence of exogenous drivers. In this Perspective, the authors outline how different transient behaviours can be influenced by management actions, and how understanding their causal mechanisms can guide future mitigation strategies.
Using the Biodiversity Finance Initiative methodology, the authors assess the extent and effectiveness of biodiversity investment across different economies. Larger economies invest more in absolute terms and proportional to GDP but invest less once GDP is controlled for, and all biodiversity variables correlated positively with investment.
Using extinction data from the geological past, the authors compare the effects of synergistic palaeoclimate interactions, where short- and long-term trends are aligned, with antagonistic ones, where they are not, finding that the former can increase extinction risk by up to 40%.
This Review highlights how information from archaeology, history, palaeoecology and other past sources can, and should, be used to inform plans to enhance the sustainability and resilience of our societies.
By studying brain DNA methylation across 13 distantly related animals, the authors show that non-CpG DNA methylation, which plays a regulatory role in cognition, is restricted to vertebrates and was assembled at the origin of the vertebrate lineage as a result of the ancestral vertebrate whole-genome duplication.
The quantity of UVA/deep violet light varies seasonally and affects locomotor activity in a marine annelid, providing cues for phenology in addition to those provided by change in photoperiod.
The intensity of UVA light, in addition to the photoperiod, is shown to determine seasonal change in the marine mass spawning annelid Platynereis dumerilii.
This study uses evolve-and-resequence experiments with fission yeast populations subjected to disruptive ecological selection under different levels of migration to ask how gene flow, ancestral variation and genetic correlations affect the evolution of adaptive divergence.
A meta-analysis of experimental effects of stressors on marine organisms shows that hypoxia could harm crustaceans, mollusks and fish to a larger extent than warming and acidification.
Propagating bacteriophage in cocultures of multiple host strains, the authors show that increasing host strain diversity decreases the rate of adaptation and selects for lower fitness generalists over higher fitness specialists.
Natural selection does not disappear with age, according to a new evolutionary demographic model. This conclusion is at odds with the widespread belief that ending reproduction relaxes purifying selection on alleles that increase our ageing body’s vulnerability to diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s or diabetes.
An age-structured population model shows that purifying selection is the norm in humans for alleles that increase susceptibility to many late-onset diseases, and that sociocultural factors need to be taken into account to understand apparent neutrality.
Analysing data from thousands of microbial communities, the authors show that these communities cluster at different ends of the spectrum between resource competition and metabolic cooperation. Cooperative communities tend to have smaller genomes and multiple auxotrophies, whereas competitive communities have larger genomes, overlapping niches and a high potential for antimicrobial activity.
The future challenges and potential opportunities of robotics and autonomous systems in urban ecosystems, and how they may impact biodiversity, are explored and prioritized via a global horizon scan of 170 experts.
Based on a global-scale analysis of the leaf elemental composition of tree species, the authors show that shared ancestry is the major factor shaping plant elementomes, thus providing large-scale empirical support for the biogeochemical niche hypothesis.