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Two key insights to better assess the ecological impact of global warming have been poorly investigated to date: global warming effects on the integrated life cycle and effects of heat waves. We tested the effect of a simulated mild (25 °C) and severe (30 °C) heat wave experienced during the larval stage on the flight ability of the damselfly Ischnura elegans. To get a mechanistic understanding of...
The rapid growth and prolific reproduction of many insect herbivores depend on the efficiencies and rates with which they acquire nutrients from their host plants. However, little is known about how nutrient assimilation efficiencies are affected by leaf maturation or how they vary between plant species. Recent work showed that leaf maturation can greatly decrease the protein assimilation efficiency...
Climate change does affect not only average rainfall and temperature but also their variation, which can reduce the predictability of suitable conditions for growth and reproduction. This situation is problematic for inhabitants of temporary waters whose reproductive success depends on rainfall and evaporation that determine the length of the aquatic phase. For organisms with long-lived dormant life...
Recovery of the threatened staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) is posited to play a key role in Caribbean reef resilience. At four Caribbean locations (including one restored and three extant populations), we quantified characteristics of contemporary staghorn coral across increasing conspecific densities, and investigated a hypothesis of facilitation between staghorn coral and reef fishes. High...
Ecological traits that reflect movement potential are often used as proxies for measured dispersal distances. Whether such traits reflect actual dispersal is often untested. Such tests are important because maximum dispersal distances may not be achieved and many dispersal events may be unsuccessful (without reproduction). For insects, many habitat patches harbour ‘resident’ species that are present...
Understanding behavioral responses of species to environmental change is critical to forecasting population-level effects. Although climate change is significantly impacting species’ distributions, few studies have examined associated changes in behavior. Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) subpopulations have varied in their near-term responses to sea ice decline. We examined behavioral responses of two...
The allostatic load model describes how individuals maintain homeostasis in challenging environment and posits that costs induced by a chronic perturbation (i.e., allostatic load) are correlated to the secretion of glucocorticoids, such as corticosterone. Habitat perturbations from anthropogenic activities are multiple and functional responses to those are still unclear. Here, we manipulated the habitat...
Rare plant species often suffer stronger conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) in studies that assess the impact of local conspecific density on individual survival. All else equal, this causes a relative disadvantage among rare species that appears inconsistent with the role of CNDD in coexistence. The resolution to this apparent paradox is for lower species abundance to decrease the frequency...
Dietary preferences of grazers can drive spatial variability in top-down control of autotroph communities, because diet composition may depend on the relative availability of autotroph species. On Caribbean coral reefs, parrotfish grazing is important in limiting macroalgae, but parrotfish dietary preferences are poorly understood. We applied diet-switching analysis to quantify the foraging preferences...
In terrestrial systems it is well known that the spatial patterns of grazing by herbivores can influence the structure of primary producer communities. On coral reefs, the consequences of varied space use by herbivores on benthic community structure are not well understood, nor are the relative influences of bottom-up (resource abundance and quality), horizontal (competition), and top-down (predation...
During the past century, grasslands in Europe have undergone marked changes in land-use, leading to a decline in plant diversity both at local and regional scales, thus possibly also affecting the mechanisms of species sorting into local communities. We studied plant species assembly in grasslands with differing habitat history and hypothesised that trait divergence prevails in historical grasslands...
Stomatal CO2 responsiveness and photosynthetic capacity vary greatly among plant species, but the factors controlling these physiological leaf traits are often poorly understood. To explore if these traits are linked to taxonomic group identity and/or to other plant functional traits, we investigated the short-term stomatal CO2 responses and the maximum rates of photosynthetic carboxylation (Vcmax...
Recent evidence suggests that plant performance can be influenced by the phylogenetic diversity of neighboring plants. However, no study to date has examined the effect of such phylogenetic density dependence on the transition from seed to seedling. Using 6 years of data on seedling recruitment and seed rain of 13 species from 130 stations (one 0.5 m2 seed trap and three adjacent 1 m2 seedling plots)...
Scatter-hoarding animals such as corvids play a crucial role in the dispersal of nut-producing tree species. This interaction is well known for some corvids, but remains elusive for other species such as the magpie (Pica pica), an abundant corvid in agroecosystems and open landscapes of the Palearctic region. In addition, the establishment of the individual dispersed seeds—a prerequisite for determining...
Life is uncertain. To reduce uncertainty and make adaptive decisions, individuals need to collect information. Individuals often visit the breeding sites of their conspecifics (i.e., “prospect”), likely to assess conspecifics’ reproductive success and to use such information to identify high-quality spots for future breeding. We investigated whether visitation rate by prospectors and success of visited...
Predators can drive trait divergence among populations of prey by imposing differential selection on prey traits. Habitat characteristics can mediate predator selectivity by providing refuge for prey. We quantified the effects of stream characteristics on biases in the sizes of spawning salmon caught by bears (Ursus arctos and U. americanus) on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada by measuring...
Interspecific competition is assumed to have a strong influence on the population dynamics of competing species, but is not easily demonstrated for mobile species in the wild. In the Florida Keys (USA), anecdotal observations have long pointed to an inverse relationship in abundance of two large decapod crustaceans found co-occurring in hard-bottom habitat, the stone crab Menippe mercenaria and the...
Eddy covariance (EC) datasets have provided insight into climate determinants of net ecosystem productivity (NEP) and evapotranspiration (ET) in natural ecosystems for decades, but most EC studies were published in serial fashion such that one study’s result became the following study’s hypothesis. This approach reflects the hypothetico-deductive process by focusing on previously derived hypotheses...
Plants interact with a myriad of microorganisms that modulate their interactions within the community. A well-described example is the symbiosis between grasses and Epichloë fungal endophytes that protects host plants from herbivores. It is suggested that these symbionts could play a protective role for plants against pathogens through the regulation of their growth and development and/or the induction...
Degradation of semiarid ecosystems from overgrazing threatens a variety of ecosystem services. Rainfall and nitrogen commonly co-limit production in semiarid grassland ecosystems; however, few studies have reported how interactive effects of precipitation and nitrogen addition influence the recovery of grasslands degraded by overgrazing. We conducted a 6-year experiment manipulating precipitation...
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