Volume 6 Issue 11, November 2022

Expert field palaeontologist who made many key discoveries about early human evolution in East Africa.

Two Palaeolithic genomes from Britain provide the oldest currently available genetic data from the region and appear to map on to wider European patterns of genetic ancestry and associated archaeology. However, with sparse samples and wide temporal gaps between them, it might be premature to draw wider conclusions about the consistency of these patterns.

An innovative isotopic labelling strategy shows that malaria mosquitoes in the West-African Sahel region survive in dormancy over the prolonged dry season. These results have implications for efforts to suppress malaria transmission in Africa.

Harnessing big data and machine learning provides an assessment of the extinction risks of palm species worldwide, and illustrates an integrative conservation planning approach that incorporates evolutionary and ecological distinctiveness as well as human use.

The effects of the redistribution of flora and fauna by European empires are still visible in global biodiversity today and can be traced through the distribution of introduced species. Attempts to solve today’s biodiversity crisis necessitates grappling these colonial legacies head on.

Fitness landscapes were described almost a century ago as smooth surfaces with peaks and valleys that are difficult to navigate. Now, more realistic high-dimensional genotype–phenotype maps show that fitness maxima can be reached from almost any other phenotype while avoiding fitness valleys, which are very rare.

In this Perspective, the authors demonstrate how concepts and models from landscape ecology and complex adaptive systems science can be used to explore the dynamics of mosquito-borne diseases in urban environments.

Social cues are known to be involved in the timing of animal migrations. In this Review, the authors outline a framework for understanding the roles of different cues across temporal scales, and how these match with ecosystem dynamics.

An analysis of 199 journals in ecology and evolution finds no link between policies mandating data sharing and the rate of article retraction or correction. The authors position this finding in a broader discussion of open data and code.

Fossil calibrations, a relative clade age calibration (informed by horizontal gene transfer) and new phylogenomic methods for mapping gene family origins resolve tracheophytes (vascular plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants) as monophyletic sister groups that diverged during the Cambrian, 515–494 million years ago. The early evolution of both groups, but particularly that of bryophytes, was characterized by major gene content change.

Quantifying changing climatic effects on ecosystem productivity and human spatiotemporal distributions during the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Iberia, the authors find evidence that the hiatus between Neanderthal and modern human cultural complexes in North Atlantic Iberia and the longer persistence of Neanderthals in southern latitudes had an ecological cause.

The authors report genetic, archaeological and stable isotopic data from two late Palaeolithic individuals in Britain, from Gough's Cave and Kendrick's Cave. The individuals differ not only in their ancestry but also their diets, ecologies and mortuary practices, revealing diverse origins and lifeways among inhabitants of late Pleistocene Britain.

Analysing >6,000 plant species from plots across the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the authors show that plant diversity consistently stabilizes community abundance across spatial scales and broad ecoclimatic domains, with the strength of the stabilizing effect increasing with scale.

A series of behavioural, electrophysiological and chemical assays are used to attempt to detect long-range sex pheromones involved in species-specific male swarm recognition by Anopheles female mosquitoes, but no evidence is found.

In the Sahel region of West Africa, An. coluzzii mosquitoes appear to survive the dry season locally, but the relative contribution of this subpopulation to the persistence of the species in the Sahel has remained unknown. Here the authors use stable isotope tracking to determine the fraction of mosquitoes that undergo aestivation, a state of dormancy that allows them to persist through the dry season and maintain yearly malaria transmission.

A comparison of fish community data with reef coral and macroalgae cover at several sites around Polynesia over 11 years and spanning disturbance events suggests that fish community diversity has only minimal influence on coral dynamics, including recovery from disturbance.

Machine learning is used to predict extinction risk for 1,381 palm species, allowing identification of priority regions for palm conservation and cases where substitution with non-threatened species could provide products for human use.

Compiling data on floral introductions and European colonial history of regions worldwide, the authors find that compositional similarity of floras is higher than expected among regions once occupied by the same empire and similarity increases with the length of time the region was occupied by that empire.

Analysing a long-term tracking dataset of migrating mule deer, the authors show that the expansion of natural gas energy infrastructure over 14 years along a migratory corridor changes deer behaviour and reduces by more than 38% their ability to keep pace with spring vegetation green-up.

In realistic high-dimensional fitness landscapes of RNA secondary structure, protein tertiary structure and protein complexes, fitness peaks can be easily reached from any starting point without traversing fitness valleys.

Using individual transcriptomes of two ant species, the authors show that caste differentiation is canalized from early development and identify key regulatory genes for the development of ant caste phenotypes.

A model of how local relatedness changes with age fits empirical patterns from seven group-living mammal species and reveals that patterns differ between the sexes and the potential behavioural consequences of these changes.