Volume 4 Issue 7, July 2020

By focusing on farmers, policymakers and local communities, a new approach to protect pollinators can become scalable in low-income countries, argues Stefanie Christmann.

The recent fires in southern Australia were unprecedented in scale and severity. Much commentary has rightly focused on the role of climate change in exacerbating the risk of fire. Here, we contend that policy makers must recognize that historical and contemporary logging of forests has had profound effects on these fires’ severity and frequency.

A global analysis of biodiversity time series across temperate zones shows contrasting fingerprints of contemporary climate warming on species assemblages over land and sea. A net increase in the number of species is evident in the warmest temperate oceans but no systematic biodiversity trend is detected in the terrestrial realm.

Urbanization can cause rapid evolutionary responses among city-dwelling species but evolution is rarely accounted for in urban conservation efforts. Here, the authors outline a framework for integrating evolutionary principles into the management of urban biodiversity.

Analysis of metacarpal trabecular and cortical bone reveals hand use diversity, including power and precision grips, among early hominins, and shows that Australopithecus sediba combined great ape-like arboreal grasping power with human-like manipulation ability.

Non-saturating relationships of biodiversity with biomass and productivity are shown in remote assemblages of coral reef fishes. These positive relationships were robust to both an extreme heatwave and invasive rats.

Biodiversity time series from temperate regions reveal that marine communities in warmer places gain species but lose individuals with warming, but colder environments show weaker trends, whereas no systematic relationships between biodiversity and temperature change were detectable for terrestrial communities.

Using historic measles epidemiological data from England and Wales in a competing-risks framework, the authors find that metapopulation aggregation in neighbouring towns and cities played an important role in driving national dynamics in the prevaccination era.

Laboratory and modelling studies show that temperature conditions can enhance the capacity of malaria to infect mosquitoes that feed in the evening compared with those that feed at midnight or in the morning.

The accumulation of somatic genetic variation in clonal species leads to heterogeneity among autonomous modules (ramets). Ultra-deep resequencing of single ramets in a clonal seagrass shows somatic genetic drift resulting in genetically differentiated ramets that are targets of selection.

Analysing a global dataset of almost 7,000 dietary records from >4,400 species of butterflies and moths, the author shows that latitudinal variation in diet breadth can be better explained by the relative position of a population within its geographic range, than by latitude per se.

Comparative analysis of genome-wide transcription in three closely related species of horned beetles with diverse degrees of nutrition responsiveness in the development of male weaponry reveals mechanisms of nutrition-responsive growth and their evolution.

By analysing pooled whole-genome sequences from two species of Darwin’s finches, both before and after interbreeding and back-crossing, the authors show that gene exchange between the two species is asymmetric and female biased.

Twin births are not frequent in human populations despite twin-bearing mothers having elevated fitness. Here, the authors show that dizygotic twinning is the outcome of an adaptive conditional ovulatory strategy of switching from single to double ovulation with increasing age.