Articles in 2024

Long-term high-resolution data on social relationships, space use and microhabitat in a wild population of mice (Apodemus sylvaticus), accompanied by sampling of the gut microbiota, show that distinct sets of microorganisms dominate social and environmental transmission routes of microbiota. Microorganisms with low oxygen tolerance are more reliant on social transmission.

Isotope analysis of human and faunal remains dated to the Later Stone Age reveals a substantial plant-based component to hunter-gatherer diets at the site of Taforalt, several millennia prior to the development of agriculture in the Levant, renewing the question of why agriculture did not develop contemporaneously in North Africa.

Species distribution modelling for 69 European tree species under current climate conditions and projected conditions to 2100 (in decadal steps) demonstrates that, for climate suitability to be maintained throughout a tree’s lifespan, many fewer tree species are available to forest managers than are currently used.

Through genetic and molecular analyses of interspecific stigma–pollen interactions, the authors show that Brassicaceae plants use an integrated pollen discrimination system and a shared pollen rejection pathway to reject conspecific self-pollen and heterospecific pollen. This establishes a mechanistic link between self-incompatibility and speciation in this clade.

In an analysis of how biotic interactions regulate hominin evolutionary dynamics, the authors show that speciation is negatively related to species diversity in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, in the same way that it is in many other vertebrates, whereas the genus Homo is characterized by positive diversity-dependent speciation and negative diversity-dependent extinction.

Analysis of cell types and circuit design of the primary rod pathway in zebrafish suggests that this specialized downstream circuit for rod signalling has been established before the divergence of teleost fish and mammals.

A transcriptomic analysis of 8 tissues across 20 bilaterian species reveals that ancestral gains of tissue-specific gene expression were closely associated with whole-genome duplications in vertebrates and the diversification of ancestral tissue types.

This study shows a pluripotent cell population with properties of vertebrate neural-crest cells and neuromesodermal progenitors in ascidian embryos, the closest invertebrate relatives of vertebrates.

Analysis of publicly available viral genomes shows that humans may give more viruses to animals than they give to us, and reveals evolutionary mechanisms underpinning viral host jumps.

A meta-transcriptomic analysis of the viromes of 2,438 mosquitoes of 81 species from across China identifies geographic hotspots of mosquito virus diversity, links between mosquito virome composition and host phylogeny, and a suggestion of long-distance mosquito dispersal.

Constructing a biosphere-scale model of the evolutionary history of metabolism based on >12,000 biochemical reactions, the authors show that a bottleneck in purine synthesis prevents metabolic expansion from geochemical precursors.

Analysing camera-trap data of 163 mammal species before and after the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns, the authors show that responses to human activity are dependent on the degree to which the landscape is modified by humans, with carnivores being especially sensitive.

Long-term experimental evolution and modelling show the evolution of small and large cluster-forming lineages of snowflake yeast that coexist over generations due to a trade-off between organismal size and competitiveness for dissolved oxygen.

Analysis of 1,673 sequenced Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates identifies 3,852 sequence blocks introgressed from Saccharomyces paradoxus, most of which are recent and clade-specific. By contrast, divergent Chinese strains of S. cerevisiae show little evidence of introgression but do share ancient polymorphisms with S. paradoxus due to incomplete lineage sorting.

Analysing >14,000 pairs of plots over 10 years, the authors show that forest understorey plant communities increase their average temperature affiliations by 0.1 °C each decade. This increase was caused by the extinction of cold-adapted species, but with no visible effect on community heterogeneity.

Analysing >1,700 inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, the authors show that the majority of Amazon tree species can occupy floodplains and that patterns of species turnover are closely linked to regional flood patterns.

Using multiple remote-sensing datasets, the authors show that temporal and spatial scale influence the detection of tree-mortality events and explain why there has been a seemingly conflicting pattern of both overall greening but also extensive tree mortality in recent decades.

Abundance data for marine fish populations show that those shifting poleward rapidly due to climate change experience substantial population declines, suggesting that rapid range shifts are not sufficient to maintain stable populations.

Conventional agricultural intensification can lead to ‘traps’ where production actually declines because of biodiversity loss. By integrating case study archetypes, literature review and simulations, the authors show what systems are at risk of traps and how these risks can be limited.

The authors analyse 8,790 prokaryotic pangenomes to identify the ecological variables associated with recent versus old horizontal gene transfer events, finding that gene transfers are more common among co-occurring, highly abundant or host-associated species.