Volume 5 Issue 3, March 2021

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development presents an exceptional opportunity to effect positive change in ocean use. We outline what is required of the deep-sea research community to achieve these ambitious objectives.

At 50, the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, 1971) has a mixed legacy. To survive and stay relevant in the Anthropocene, the convention will need to embrace new ecological thinking and conservation approaches.

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.

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.

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.

Stable carbon isotope analysis of modern and archaeological pandanus nutshell from Australia’s oldest known archaeological site of Madjedbebe reveals precipitation fluctuations over the last 65,000 years.

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%.

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.

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.

A two-species eco-evolutionary model based on consumer–resource interactions and quantitative genetic inheritance shows how evolution among competitors changes the components of stable coexistence.

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.

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.

Human-driven evolutionary changes are captured by comparison of the genomes of natural, cultivated and introduced populations of a globally distributed Pacific kelp.

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.

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.

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.