Volume 6 Issue 8, August 2022

Josefa Cariño Tauli is an Ibaloi-Kankanaey Igorot Indigenous person from the Cordillera Region in the Northern Philippines. She is currently the policy co-coordinator for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, the international coordination platform for youth participation in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Archaeologist who emphasized the importance of chronology in understanding Palaeolithic Europe, and laid the framework for the archaeology of modern human origins.

An experiment in secondary forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo finds that calcium, an overlooked soil nutrient, is scarcer than phosphorus, and represents a potentially greater limitation on tropical forest growth.

Mating in insects relies on pheromone production in just one of the sexes. A multidisciplinary study on the German cockroach identifies a gene that connects sex differentiation factors with the production of sexual pheromones in females only.

Pharaoh ants live in highly organized colonies with elaborate social structure. An atlas of the brain cells of the different sexes and social groups of this ant reveals cell compositions tailored to the tasks performed by each group.

Longitudinal data spanning 43 years from a wild ungulate population reveal changes in social connectedness as individuals age, and suggest that these changes may in part be driven by changes in spatial behaviour.

In drylands, there are unique mechanisms that influence multiple ecosystem processes. In this Perspective, the authors identify these dryland mechanisms and show that they could become more important in non-dryland regions or areas that will become drier in the future.

Transmissible cancers are governed by the same evolutionary processes as asexually reproducing, unicellular organisms. This Review discusses population genetics processes that determine the evolution of clonally transmissible cancers.

A new fossil cnidarian, Auroralumina attenboroughi, from the Ediacaran of Charnwood Forest, UK, described as showing mosaic anthozoan and medusozoan characters, is the oldest yet-known crown-group cnidarian.

Previous meta-analyses have found that few ecological time series are actually chaotic; here, the authors use recently developed chaos detection methods and a larger number of time series to show that 30% of studied time series are characterized as chaotic.

In a meta-analysis of studies comparing monocultures to plant species mixtures, the authors show that mixtures increase three different variables related to the phosphorus cycle: soil total phosphorus, phosphatase activity and available phosphorus.

Biogeochemical analysis of a chronosequence of secondary forest succession in lowland Central Africa suggests that calcium becomes an increasingly scarce and potentially limiting resource with stand age and ecosystem calcium storage shifts from soil to woody biomass.

Competition among species in the coral microbiome has important outcomes in terms of coral health, but little is known about the mechanisms allowing pathogens to gain a competitive advantage. Here the authors show that the pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus outcompetes commensal bacteria by inducing prophages.

Combining field data and greenhouse experiments, the authors show how agricultural management practices like fungicide applications can affect the degree to which arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soil provision phosphorus to plants.

Directed evolution shows that low expression of the green fluorescent protein facilitates the evolution of cyan fluorescence in E. coli, which can be explained by synergy between the protein’s scarcity and its stability.

Comparing the regulatory behaviour of naturally segregating promoter variants to randomly mutated promoters, the authors demonstrate both stabilizing and directional selection that reduce variation in phenotype.

A multidisciplinary approach, including genetics and behavioural assays, identifies a single gene, CYP4PC1, which integrates both sex differentiation and hormone signalling with sexual attractiveness in the German cockroach.

Using single-cell transcriptomics, the authors generate a brain cell atlas for the pharaoh ant including individuals of different sexes and castes and show changes in cell composition underlying division of labour and reproductive specialization.

Mammals host a diversity of parasites including lice. Using cophylogenetics and phylogenetic comparative methods, the authors show that the main lineages of placental mammal lice had a single common ancestor and find that all parasitic lice had an avian ancestral host.

The authors construct a time-calibrated phylogeny spanning >90% of spiny-rayed fishes to explore patterns of body shape disparity within acanthomorphs. They find a trend of steady accumulation of lineages from the Cenozoic, with an increase in morphological disparity following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene event, facilitating the radiation of diverse morphotypes that characterize acanthomorphs’ widespread ecological success today.

Zebra finches flying in a wind tunnel use both vocal and visual communication to orientate themselves within the flock, and are able to enhance their use of one form of communication over another depending on circumstance.

Using 46 years of individually monitored data for European red deer, the authors show that older individuals become less socially connected, with correlated changes to their spatial behaviour.