Reviews & Analysis

Climate warming is driving a global redistribution of marine life as species shift their distribution to accommodate temperature changes. This is often analysed at the ocean surface, but a global analysis of temperature vertical migration provides a new perspective of the challenges and opportunities for marine life under future warming.

A group of early terrestrial vertebrates called varanopids, long regarded as mammal-line amniotes, is placed wholesale with reptiles in a new analysis of early amniote relationships. Meanwhile, a new species of varanopid from Canada provides the oldest evidence for extended parental care in terrestrial vertebrates.

A large-scale, cross-taxa analysis reveals high nonlinearity and limited long-term predictability in the dynamics of animal populations.

The physical linkage of the first self-replicating molecules is likely to have been selected based on their capacity to perform cooperative catalysis.

Data from hundreds of natural communities show that rare species share more positive associations with each other than abundant species, which tend to be more segregated. These patterns are consistent with facilitation for rare species and competition for abundant ones, and hold true across taxa and biogeographic regions.

A phylogenomic re-analysis of sequence data strongly supports the emergence of eukaryotes from within the archaeal radiation and underlines the importance of using the most accurate approaches to reconstruct ancient divergences in the tree of life.

There has been intense debate as to whether biodiversity increases or reduces the risk of infectious disease. This Review is the result of researchers from both sides of the debate attempting to reach a consensus.

Comparative analyses of egg colouration and experimental data suggest that variation in egg colours between species is shaped by thermoregulatory needs.

A new modelling study highlights the importance of the search process in predator–prey interactions. When predators act on information related to prey location, the dynamics and stability of populations are more realistic.

Sex-determining systems are incredibly diverse. Here, the author reviews sex determination in non-model vertebrates and invertebrates, and discusses theoretical models that explain diversity in sex determination.

A field test suggests that orally ingestible, spreadable vaccines to combat rabies will transmit widely among vampire bats in the wild, offering a more humane — and effective — alternative to the bat culling practiced throughout Latin America today.

The authors hypothesize an ancestral condition of indiscriminate sexual behaviours directed towards all sexes, rather than a state in which different-sex sexual behaviour is a baseline and same-sex sexual behaviour is anomalous.

Analysis of the world’s longest-running insect monitoring programme finds little evidence to support steep declines in biomass across the United Kingdom over the past 50 years. Moth biomass showed a net increase, but a gradual post-1982 decline was found in certain land uses and for some moth families.

Temperature differences between cities and the countryside have been regarded as useful surrogates for ecological responses to climate warming. However, research reveals mismatch between the phenological responses to spatial and temporal temperature gradients as well as complex interactions between urbanization and climate.

The recently evolved Y chromosome of Drosophila miranda shows a massive increase in gene number and signatures of antagonistic coevolution of the Y and X.

The pools of the geothermal Dallol Dome and surrounding area (in the Danakil Depression of Ethiopia) are an extreme example of complex brines: many lack evidence of life, but others are habitats for archaea and other extremophiles, prompting questions about the biophysical limits for microbial function.

Expert elicitation methods identify seven priority themes and questions for the field of microbiome research in coastal marine ecosystems.

The existence of trade-offs between traits under selection is a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology. Analysis of a densely sampled collection of adaptive mutations in yeast reveals that no single mutation can allow it to overcome detected trade-offs between key traits under selection.

Inferred gene expression differences between modern humans and our extinct archaic relatives suggest potential mechanistic bases for the evolution of hominin phenotypes.

A Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment experiment that manipulates seawater pH on a coral reef flat shows that the level of ocean acidification at which net dissolution of corals occurs may arrive much sooner than expected.