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As extremely large microbial community datasets have proliferated, numerous approaches to studying their ecological properties have emerged. In this Review, the authors offer a guide to five ecological modelling techniques used to study complex microbial communities.
Examining the evolutionary history of ungulate migration shows that this behaviour has evolved multiple times in response to grassland expansion and increased seasonality of resources.
Analysis of sediment and pore water from three seagrass meadows around the world reveals an unexpected accumulation of labile carbon in the marine rhizosphere, explained by sediment chemistry.
A computational method that negates the need to directly measure species interactions provides evidence in support of classic theory, stating that microbial communities with higher diversity remain stable as long they have low complexity and weaker interactions.
For decades, the origin of mitochondria during eukaryogenesis has been viewed as a response to Earth’s oxygenation, but this has been challenged by more recent research. Here, the authors review recent literature, concluding that eukaryogenesis and the rise of oxygen were decoupled, and obligate aerosis in eukaryotes has only become widespread in the past 1 billion years
Ocean afforestation is a proposed method for large-scale carbon dioxide removal, involving exporting rafts of nearshore macroalgae to the open ocean for long-term occupation and then sinking. In this Perspective, the authors caution that this approach has multiple potential ramifications for ocean chemistry and ecology.
Simultaneous evolution of vaccine-induced immune escape and virulence leads to different evolutionary end points, depending on the type of vaccine-induced protection.
An analysis of phenotypic skew — the asymmetrical distributions of traits — explores how it can bias estimates of inheritance and selection, and how to correct for those biases.
Combining pantropical fish community surveys with bioenergetic models has revealed the global distribution of reef-fish ecosystem functions, and that trade-offs linked to demographic and trophic structure prevent any community from maximizing all functions simultaneously.
A framework to experimentally traverse the large space of functionally neutral variants in a toxin–antitoxin protein complex reveals insights on evolvability and entrenchment of molecular interactions.
Analysis of the dynamics of transposons that encode resistance to different antibiotics shows that the movement of genes under positive selection from the chromosome to mobile genetic elements such as plasmids can be beneficial in bacteria. Once integrated into plasmids, these genes can spread by horizontal gene transfer.
Experimentally manipulating precipitation levels in a plant–soil feedback experiment reveals changes to the interactions between plants and soil microbes that render community dynamics less predictable under wetter conditions.
This Perspective discusses how the latest advances in remote sensing can be used to answer basic ecological and evolutionary questions, as well as contribute to important biodiversity monitoring.
Taking advantage of natural variation present in six populations of wild orangutans, a new study correlates population density with multiple facets of individuals’ vocal phenotype and demonstrates that sociality influences vocal plasticity in great apes.
Population genomic and phylogenomic analyses of Atlantic cod provide new insights into the origin and maintenance of supergenes and highlight the role of recombination and structural variants.
An exceptionally large species of sauropod titanosaur from the Late Cretaceous of northern Spain provides insight into changing diversity dynamics of titanosaurs over time, and sheds light on faunal turnover and migration.
Rapid morphological evolution in early echinoderms was later outpaced by increases in ecological diversification, indicating the phylum exhibited morphological volatility and ecological constraints at its origin.
