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Interactions with resident species can affect the rate that expanding species invade novel areas. These interactions can be antagonistic (biotic resistance), where resident species hinder invasive establishment, or facilitative (biotic assistance), where residents promote invasive establishment. The predominance of resistance or assistance could vary with the abiotic context. We examined how the effects...
Detailed information on the nutrition of free-ranging mammals contributes to the understanding of life history requirements, yet is often quite limited temporally for most species. Reliable dietary inferences can be made by analyzing the stable carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) isotopic values (δ13C and δ15N) of some consumer tissues; exactly which tissue is utilized dictates the inferential scope. Steller...
The cost of parental care has long been thought to favor the evolution of cooperative breeding, because breeders can provide reduced parental care when aided by alloparents. Oxidative stress—the imbalance between reactive oxygen species and neutralizing antioxidants—has been proposed to mediate the cost of parental care, though results from empirical studies remain equivocal. We measured changes in...
Understanding the ecosystem-level persistence of pathogens is essential for predicting and measuring host–pathogen dynamics. However, this process is often masked, in part due to a reliance on host-based pathogen detection methods. The amphibian pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and B. salamandrivorans (Bsal) are pathogens of global conservation concern. Despite having free-living life...
The strength and outcome of mutualistic interactions can be highly dependent on the combination of traits of the species involved. Distinct foraging strategies (e.g., hunting mode) of mutualistic predators may cause predator–prey interactions to vary, potentially affecting the strength of trophic cascades. We evaluate the causes of variation in the strength of spider–plant mutualisms by focusing on...
Environmental heterogeneity (EH) plays a central role in hypotheses used to explain distributions of species diversity. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of species richness–EH (S–EH) relationships reported for experimental or quasi-experimental studies. We controlled for the lack of independence among effect sizes and additionally performed a cumulative meta-analysis. We found that EH has a consistent...
Although food-hoarding animals benefit plant seeds by generating predation pressure on granivorous insects, we lack experimental evidence of whether the tripartite interactions maintain a mutualistic relationship between the third trophic level and primary producers. Relying on the behavior of shelling, Siberian chipmunks (Tamias sibiricus) selectively consumed weevil larvae infested in acorns of...
Frugivorous birds are able to track spatiotemporal changes in fruit availability. Food resource fluctuations, characteristic of seasonal environments, can be affected by the naturalization of exotic ornithocorous plants. In the mountain forest of central Argentina, invasive shrubs of the genus Pyracantha provide a new temporal resource that modifies fluctuations of natural resource availability because...
In temperate deciduous forests of eastern USA, most earthworm communities are dominated by invasive species. Their structure and functional group composition have critical impacts on ecological properties and processes. However, the factors determining their community structure are still poorly understood, and little is known regarding their dynamics during forest succession and the mechanisms leading...
Life history changes may change resource use. Such shifts are not well understood in the dung beetles, despite recognised differences in larval and adult feeding ability. We use the flightless dung beetle Circellium bacchus to explore such shifts, identifying dung sources of adults using DNA metabarcoding, and comparing these with published accounts of larval dung sources. C. bacchus is traditionally...
Anthropogenic environmental change can impact community and population traits such as species diversity and population densities, which have been shown to influence the prevalence of viruses in wildlife reservoirs. In particular, host species resilient to changes in their natural habitat may increase in numbers, which in turn can affect the prevalence of directly transmitted viruses. We have carried...
All dynamic species interaction models contain an assumption that describes how contact rates scale with population density. Choosing an appropriate contact–density function is important, because different functions have different implications for population dynamics and stability. However, this choice can be challenging, because there are many possible functions, and most are phenomenological and...
Seagrasses are key marine foundation species, currently declining due to the compounded action of global and regional anthropogenic stressors. Eutrophication has been associated with seagrass decline, while grazing has been traditionally considered to be a natural disturbance with a relatively low impact on seagrasses. In the recent years, this assumption has been revisited. Here, by means of a 16-month...
Intermittent breeding may be adaptive for long-lived species subjected to large accessory reproductive costs, but it may also reflect reduced adaptation to the environment, reducing population growth. Nevertheless, environmental influences on breeding propensity, particularly that of predation risk, remain poorly understood and difficult to study, because non-breeders are typically not identified...
Environmental and biological context play significant roles in modulating physiological stress responses of individuals in wildlife populations yet are often overlooked when evaluating consequences of human disturbance on individual health and fitness. Furthermore, most studies gauge individual stress responses based on a single physiological biomarker, typically circulating glucocorticoid concentrations,...
Elevational gradients are characterized by strong abiotic variation within small geographical distances and provide a powerful tool to evaluate community response to variation in climatic and other environmental factors. We explored how temperature and habitat diversity shape the diversity of holometabolous predator and parasitoid insects along temperate elevational gradients in the European Alps...
Species invading new habitats experience novel selection pressures that can lead to rapid evolution, which may contribute to invasion success and/or increased impact on native community members. Many studies have hypothesized that plants in the introduced range will be larger than those in the native range, leading to increases in competitive ability. There is mixed support for evolution of larger...
Trade-offs between juvenile survival and the development of sexually selected traits can cause ontogenetic conflict between life stages that constrains adaptive evolution. However, the potential for ecological interactions to alter the presence or strength of these trade-offs remains largely unexplored. Antagonistic selection over the accumulation and storage of resources could be one common cause...
Phenological synchrony can promote population growth in species with positive density dependence. Variation among life stages in the thermal thresholds for development can foster phenological synchrony under thermal regimes that include frequent occurrence of temperatures between developmental thresholds. The southern pine beetle is an insect with positive density dependence that has recently undergone...
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