Volume 7 Issue 3, March 2023

Calls to decolonize disciplines and institutions circulate in the scientific community. In ecology, only the surface of the colonial structure has been scratched. We propose that two gaps must be filled to decolonize the ‘decolonial turn’ itself: recognition of decolonial theories produced in the Global South and a deeper historical and socioeconomic analysis of forms of production and validation of knowledge in ecology.

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A study of plant–pollinator networks in a fragmented island landscape in China finds that habitat edges might not be bad for biodiversity.

Laboratory-quantified spatial memory and subsequent free-ranging movements show how learning about space and establishing familiar areas increase fitness in pheasants.

In the period 1880 to 2020, intraspecific body-size variation increased in many mammal and bird species in North America, along with declines in average body size. These results suggest potential buffering effects against species downsizing and species capacity to cope with environmental change, but warn of an increasing possibility of maladaptation.

The authors outline a framework for predicting animal population collapse under external stressors, based on a predictable sequence of observable changes through time.

The authors report a specialized obsidian handaxe workshop at the site of Simbiro III in Ethiopia, suggesting that hominins more than 1.2 million years ago took advantage of opportunities provided by changing environmental conditions.

The authors compiled body size data from mammal and bird museum collections in North America to show that intraspecific variation in body size, but not mean body size, has increased over time.

Using an algorithm for ancestral genome reconstruction, the authors present 624 ancestral genomes for vertebrates, plants, fungi, metazoans and protists and reconstruct the chromosomal rearrangement history of all major vertebrate clades.

Focusing on the serial differentiation of the presacral column across 1,136 extant mammal species, the authors find evidence of high within-group variation and an evolutionary trend towards increasing complexity.

A qualitative and quantitative analysis of 186 biodiversity-related policies in Colombia is used to describe how biodiversity has been integrated into policy domains, which policy instruments are most prevalent and how the policy mix has changed over six decades.

Analysing 20,000 plant-pollinator interactions over 3 yr in a fragmented island ecosystem, the authors show that forest edges benefit community diversity and network robustness to extinction in the face of declining forest area.

The authors resurveyed a previously sampled set of mountain transects on five continents, showing that the ranges of non-native plant species have shifted upslope in most locations in just 5–10 years.

Adaptation to new environments often involves changes in gene expression. This study shows a role of ancestral gene expression plasticity in heavy metal adaptation of two independent lineages of Silene uniflora.

Genomic analyses show that two independent fusions involving the same chromosome altered recombination patterns and contributed to reproductive isolation between two Pristionchus nematodes.

Single-cell RNA sequencing of testes from young and old male Drosophila, together with genomic sequencing of somatic tissues of the same flies, shows distinct mutational biases in old and young flies and suggests late spermatogenesis as a source of evolutionary innovation.

Social insects often groom nestmates as an anti-pathogen behaviour, providing social immunity. Here the authors show that anti-fungal grooming behaviour by ants selects for the fungus to produce more but less-virulent and less-detectable spores, suggesting pathogen adaptation to social immunity.

After assaying the cognitive ability of juvenile pheasants and releasing them into a new landscape, the authors show that pheasants with better memory developed larger home range sizes and more successfully avoided predation at the edges of the home range.