Ecology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cells of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiaecan mate with other cells of opposite mating type. Here, the authors show that the combination of a pheromone and a pheromone-degrading enzyme allows yeast cells to monitor relative mate abundance within a population and adjust their commitment to sexual reproduction.

    • Alvaro Banderas
    • , Mihaly Koltai
    •  & Victor Sourjik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mechanisms allowing highly biodiverse ecosystems to remain stable are poorly understood. Here, Gravel and colleagues provide theoretical evidence that dispersal of organisms and material modifies species interactions and thus enables highly biodiverse communities to exist.

    • Dominique Gravel
    • , François Massol
    •  & Mathew A. Leibold

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A long-standing ecological hypothesis is that complexity should decrease stability in food webs. Here, Jacquet and colleagues analyse over 100 real-world food webs and show that complexity does not decrease stability, but that a high frequency of weak species interactions stabilizes complex food webs.

    • Claire Jacquet
    • , Charlotte Moritz
    •  & Dominique Gravel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Non-parental helpers contribute to offspring care in many species; however, the amount of care provided varies considerably across species. Here, Green et al. perform a phylogenetic comparative analysis of helping behavior in 36 cooperatively-breeding bird species and find that helper effort increases with relatedness to the recipient of care.

    • Jonathan P. Green
    • , Robert P. Freckleton
    •  & Ben J. Hatchwell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Habitat loss and urbanization are primary components of human impact on the environment. Here, Venter et al.use global data on infrastructure, agriculture, and urbanization to show that the human footprint is growing slower than the human population, but footprints are increasing in biodiverse regions.

    • Oscar Venter
    • , Eric W. Sanderson
    •  & James E. M. Watson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intensifying drought has caused massive die-offs in ecosystems worldwide. Here, Angelini et al.use observations, experiments, and models in US salt marshes to show that a key mutualism increases ecosystem resilience by maintaining stress-resistant habitat patches that aid post-drought recovery.

    • Christine Angelini
    • , John N. Griffin
    •  & Brian R. Silliman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Females tend to invest more than males in caring for offspring, which has been argued to be a consequence of the small initial difference in investment in eggs versus sperm. Here, Fromhage and Jennions formalize this argument mathematically in a model of the evolution of sex roles in parental care.

    • Lutz Fromhage
    •  & Michael D. Jennions

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coral reefs are productive ecosystems due to high levels of nutrient recycling in which fishes play a critical role. This study shows fishing can reduce the amount of nutrients supplied and stored by fishes to coral reefs by nearly half, even when the number of fish species present is largely unchanged.

    • Jacob E. Allgeier
    • , Abel Valdivia
    •  & Craig A. Layman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neonicotinoid as insecticide on oilseed rape can reduce bee colony density, but its effect at a large geographical scale is unclear. This study describes 18-year long wild bee tracking data in England and show neonicotinoid use is correlated with wild bee population declines at real landscape scales.

    • Ben A. Woodcock
    • , Nicholas J. B. Isaac
    •  & Richard F. Pywell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How do species adapt to environmental change when living with different kinds of competitors? Through a reciprocal transplant experiment, the authors show that competitive community alters the nature of selection so that species adapt to elevated CO2in different ways in varying community contexts.

    • Elizabeth J. Kleynhans
    • , Sarah P. Otto
    •  & Mark Vellend

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite their complexity, ecological networks appear robust to species loss. Here, Strona and Lafferty use artificial life simulations and real-world data to show that such robustness applies to stable conditions, but can collapse when the environment changes.

    • Giovanni Strona
    •  & Kevin D. Lafferty

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though both the presence and traits of a species can influence the dynamics of its ecological community, the effects of these factors are difficult to disentangle. Here, Gómez et al. demonstrate in a microbial mesocosm that local adaptation of a focal species can influence the community as much as the presence of the focal species per se.

    • Pedro Gómez
    • , Steve Paterson
    •  & Angus Buckling

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether and how birds sleep during long-distance flights has remained a mystery. Here, Rattenborg and colleagues show for the first time that frigatebirds can sleep during flight, but do so in remarkably small amounts.

    • Niels C Rattenborg
    • , Bryson Voirin
    •  & Alexei L. Vyssotski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A major challenge of theoretical ecology is explaining the stable coexistence of diverse multi-species communities. Here, the authors show that when the interactions among two species depend on the presence of other species, the diversity of the community becomes a necessity rather than an obstacle for its stability.

    • Eyal Bairey
    • , Eric D. Kelsic
    •  & Roy Kishony

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change velocity describes organism exposure to a modified climate, but as a distance-based metric, fails to consider that trajectories traverse dissimilar environments. Here, the authors calculate minimum cumulative exposure, finding that mountainous regions are particularly vulnerable.

    • Solomon Z. Dobrowski
    •  & Sean A. Parks

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Protected areas are thought essential for biodiversity conservation, but few studies confirm that protection benefits species. Here, Gray and Hill et al. analyse a global, taxonomically broad database to show that local species richness and abundance are higher inside protected areas than outside.

    • Claudia L. Gray
    • , Samantha L. L. Hill
    •  & Jörn P. W. Scharlemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sharks’ dorsal fins are thought to assist propulsion and turns while pectoral fins are thought to oppose sharks’ negative buoyancy. Here, Payne and colleagues show that hammerhead sharks use an exaggerated dorsal fin to generate lift by swimming on their side.

    • Nicholas L. Payne
    • , Gil Iosilevskii
    •  & Yuuki Y. Watanabe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extinction after habit loss does not occur immediately. Here, the authors develop a model and estimate how fast extinction debt is paid off after habit loss, and show a temporal profile of species diversity decays in a power-law fashion with a half-life increasing slowly with habit size and area.

    • John M. Halley
    • , Nikolaos Monokrousos
    •  & Despoina Vokou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attine ants, including the leaf-cutting ants, cultivate fungi as their sole source of food. Here, Nygaard et al. use whole genome and transcriptome sequences from seven ant species and their fungal cultivars to reconstruct the reciprocal genetic changes underlying the evolution of the ant-fungus mutualism.

    • Sanne Nygaard
    • , Haofu Hu
    •  & Jacobus J. Boomsma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether conditions experienced on long-distance migrations affect breeding populations is not clear. Here, the authors tracked migrating Common Cuckoos from the UK to Africa and show that route choices affect mortality during migration, and population decline in this nocturnally migrating bird.

    • Chris M. Hewson
    • , Kasper Thorup
    •  & Philip W. Atkinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tidal channel networks mediate the exchange of water, nutrients, sediment and biota between an estuary and marshes. Here, the authors show that the presence of vegetation on the marsh platform contributes to the formation of an efficient channel network.

    • William S. Kearney
    •  & Sergio Fagherazzi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Oceanic anoxia is invoked for driving the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction, but the timing, distribution and chemical state are poorly understood. Here, the authors show that fluctuations of anoxic, non-sulfidic (ferruginous) conditions were important for the delayed biotic recovery in the Neo-Tethys.

    • M. O. Clarkson
    • , R. A. Wood
    •  & L. Krystyn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate warming has a wide range of effects on biodiversity. Here, Zhou et al. show that although variation in environmental temperature is a primary driver of soil microbial biodiversity, microbes show much lower rates of turnover across temperature gradients than other major taxa.

    • Jizhong Zhou
    • , Ye Deng
    •  & James H. Brown

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many microbial lineages have not yet been cultured, which hampers our understanding of their physiology. Here, Wurch et al. use single-cell genomics to infer cultivation conditions for the isolation of a tiny ectosymbiotic nanoarchaeon and its crenarchaeota host from a geothermal spring.

    • Louie Wurch
    • , Richard J. Giannone
    •  & Mircea Podar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Paleogene continental collision between the Indian subcontinent and Asia initiated biotic interchange over a timescale of millions of years. Klaus et al. develop a phylogeographic method to estimate the dynamics of biotic interchange over these timescales, revealing periods of acceleration, stagnation and decline.

    • Sebastian Klaus
    • , Robert J. Morley
    •  & Jia-Tang Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hypoxia has diverse effects on aquatic life. Wang et al.show that reproductive defects resulting from hypoxia are epigenetically heritable in Japanese rice fish, and that this intergenerational inheritance is accompanied by differential methylation and gene expression in sperm.

    • Simon Yuan Wang
    • , Karen Lau
    •  & Rudolf Shiu-Sun Wu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The establishment of marine reserves in areas previously exploited by humans is recognised as an effective conservation tool. Through modelling effects of isolation from human influence, D'agata et al. show that marine reserves fall short of supporting key ecological values compared with wilderness areas.

    • Stéphanie D’agata
    • , David Mouillot
    •  & Laurent Vigliola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social networks have important implications to a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Here, Ilany and Akçay develop a social network model and show that inheritance of social contacts leads to networks with properties observed in species such as sleepy lizards and spotted hyenas.

    • Amiyaal Ilany
    •  & Erol Akçay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cyanobacterial nitrogen fixation supplies bioavailable nitrogen to marine ecosystems, but the mechanisms governing iron and phosphorus co-limitation in elevated CO2remain unknown. Here, the authors show a complex cellular response to co-limitation characterized by changes in growth, cell size, and the proteome.

    • Nathan G. Walworth
    • , Fei-Xue Fu
    •  & David A. Hutchins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glacier retreat due to climate change can affect the biodiversity and ecosystem function. Here, Cauvy-Fraunié and colleagues manipulated the flow of tropical glacier-fed stream in the Ecuadorian Andes, and show that benthic fauna community composition requires several months before it can recover to the pre-blockade conditions.

    • Sophie Cauvy-Fraunié
    • , Patricio Andino
    •  & Olivier Dangles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate is broadly assumed to control vegetation, with vegetation lags thought to last no more than a few centuries. Here, based on the analysis of Lake El’gygytgyn pollen record, the authors show that vegetation-climate disequilibrium persisted for several millennia during the Plio-Pleistocene transition.

    • Ulrike Herzschuh
    • , H. John B. Birks
    •  & Julie Brigham-Grette

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modularity in food webs can be caused by spatial and temporal mismatches in interactions. Here, Jacopo Grilli, Tim Rogers and Stefano Allesina show that modularity, contrary to expectations, does not generally help stabilizing ecological communities.

    • Jacopo Grilli
    • , Tim Rogers
    •  & Stefano Allesina

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Arctic is melting at an unprecedented rate and key drivers are changes in snow and ice albedo. Here, the authors show that red pigmented snow algae play a crucial role in decreasing surface albedo and their patterns for diversity, pigmentation, and consequently albedo, are ubiquitous across the Arctic.

    • Stefanie Lutz
    • , Alexandre M. Anesio
    •  & Liane G. Benning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Why does population variability differ? Sæther et al. show that the magnitude of temporal variation of avian population fluctuations is mainly determined by environmental fluctuations affecting recruitment, whereas regulation of mean population size occurs through density-dependent mortality.

    • Bernt-Erik Sæther
    • , Vidar Grøtan
    •  & Henri Weimerskirch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global gridded crop models are increasingly used to assess climate change impacts on food production. Here, the authors assess crop yield uncertainty associated with soil data input, reporting that soil type strongly influences yield estimates, and may either buffer or amplify climate-related impacts.

    • Christian Folberth
    • , Rastislav Skalský
    •  & Marijn van der Velde

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The cause of a 20% decline in sea floor calcareous foraminifera species during the Mid-Pleistocene remains enigmatic. Here, the authors present new geochemical evidence, from the Tasman Sea that supports a change in phytoplankton food source as the primary driver.

    • Sev Kender
    • , Erin L. McClymont
    •  & Henry Elderfield

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Particles of organic matter in the ocean harbour microbial communities that digest and recycle essential nutrients. Here, Datta et al.use model marine particles to show that the attached bacterial communities undergo rapid, reproducible successions driven by ecological interactions.

    • Manoshi S. Datta
    • , Elzbieta Sliwerska
    •  & Otto X. Cordero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sponges are early-diverging marine organisms that establish complex symbioses with microorganisms. Here, Thomas et al.analyse the microbial communities associated with 81 species of sponges from around the world, shedding light on the ecological and evolutionary drivers of these host-microbe associations.

    • Torsten Thomas
    • , Lucas Moitinho-Silva
    •  & Nicole S. Webster

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental change is thought to have driven the recent emergence of Lyme disease in Europe. Using a decade of human disease incidence data across a large area in Norway, Mysterud et al.show that incidence correlates with deer population, but that deer population plays a limited role in recent disease emergence.

    • Atle Mysterud
    • , William Ryan Easterday
    •  & Hildegunn Viljugrein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Species diversity is thought to play an important role in maintaining production stability. Shi et al.demonstrate that the dominant C4 plant also makes a substantial contribution to temporal stability in a grassland ecosystem subject to 15 years of experimental warming and hay harvest.

    • Zheng Shi
    • , Xia Xu
    •  & Yiqi Luo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Delimiting populations is crucial for conserving threatened species. Using genome-wide data from the whole of Antarctica, Cristofari et al.show that Emperor penguins are organised into a single global population that have shared demography since the late Quarternary.

    • Robin Cristofari
    • , Giorgio Bertorelle
    •  & Emiliano Trucchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental change can have indirect effects on populations by altering the outcome of competitive interactions. Here, Chu et al. show that although direct effects dominate the responses of grassland species to climate perturbations, indirect effects could be greater among species with smaller niche differences.

    • Chengjin Chu
    • , Andrew R. Kleinhesselink
    •  & Peter B. Adler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Killer whales have evolved into specialized ecotypes based on hunting strategies and ecological niches. Here, Andrew Foote and colleagues sequenced the whole genome of individual killer whales representing 5 different ecotypes from North Pacific and Antarctic, and show expansion of small founder groups to adapt to specific ecological niches.

    • Andrew D. Foote
    • , Nagarjun Vijay
    •  & Jochen B.W. Wolf

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Ecology across other nature.com journals