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Understanding transmission is a critical prerequisite for predicting disease dynamics and impacts on host populations. It is well established that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the amphibian fungal pathogen responsible for chytridiomycosis, can be transmitted directly, through physical contact with an infected host. However, indirect pathways of transmission remain poorly investigated. We conducted...
Density‐dependent shifts in population processes like territoriality, reproduction, dispersal, and parasite transmission are driven by changes in contacts between individuals. Despite this, surprisingly little is known about how contacts change with density, and thus the mechanisms driving density‐dependent processes. A simple linear contact–density function is often assumed, but this is not based...
The traits of animals and plants influence their interaction networks, but the significance of species' traits for the resulting ecosystem functions is poorly understood. A crucial ecosystem function in the tropics is seed dispersal by animals. While the importance of species' traits for structuring plant–frugivore networks is supported by a number of studies, no study has so far identified the functional...
In marine mammals such as pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses), reproductive strategies reveal how species acquire, store and allocate energy to offspring. During lactation, females can allocate energy acquired from concurrent resources (income breeding); or utilize energy stored prior to reproduction (capital breeding). Mothers transfer a large proportion of energy to their pups via lipid rich...
Theoretical models of environmentally transmitted diseases often assume that transmission is a constant process, which scales linearly with pathogen dose. Here we question the applicability of such an assumption and propose a sigmoidal form for the pathogens infectivity response. In our formulation, this response arises under two assumptions: 1) multiple invasion events are required for a successful...
Studies focusing on the effects of spatial processes versus environmental filtering on aquatic metacommunities have so far been focused almost entirely on relatively isolated systems, such as sets of different lakes or streams. In contrast, metacommunity patterns and underlying processes within a single aquatic system have received less attention. In this study, we aimed to examine how strongly variations...
Food availability and predation risk can have drastic impacts on animal behaviour and populations. The tradeoff between foraging and predator avoidance is crucial for animal survival and will strongly affect individual body mass, since large fat reserves are beneficial to reduce starvation but may increase predation risk. However, two‐factor experiments simultaneously investigating the interactive...
Camera trap data are increasingly being used to characterise relationships between the spatiotemporal activity patterns of sympatric mammal species, often with a view to inferring inter‐specific interactions. In this context, we attempted to characterise the kleptoparasitic and predatory tendencies of spotted hyaenas Crocuta crocuta and lions Panthera leo from photographic data collected across 54...
Animal movement is a fundamental process shaping ecosystems at multiple levels, from the fate of individuals to global patterns of biodiversity. The spatio‐temporal dynamic of food resources is a major driver of animal movement and generates patterns ranging from range residency to migration and nomadism. Arctic tundra predators face a strongly fluctuating environment marked by cyclic microtine populations,...
Animal movement strategies including migration, dispersal, nomadism, and residency are shaped by broad‐scale spatial‐temporal structuring of the environment, including factors such as the degrees of spatial variation, seasonality and inter‐annual predictability. Animal movement strategies, in turn, interact with the characteristics of individuals and the local distribution of resources to determine...
Negative density feedbacks have been extensively described in animal species and involve both consumptive (i.e. trophic interactions) and non‐consumptive (i.e. social interactions) mechanisms. Glucocorticoids are a major component of the physiological stress response and homeostasis, and therefore make a good candidate for proximate determinants of negative density feedbacks. Here, we combined laboratory...
Seasonal changes in environmental drivers – such as temperature, rainfall, and resource availability – have the potential to shape infection dynamics through their reverberating effects on biological processes including host abundance and susceptibility to infection. However, seasonality varies geographically. We therefore expect marked differences in infection dynamics between regions with different...
The decomposition of plant material is an important ecosystem process influencing both carbon cycling and soil nutrient availability. Quantifying how plant diversity affects decomposition is thus crucial for predicting the effect of the global decline in plant diversity on ecosystem functioning. Plant diversity could affect the decomposition process both directly through the diversity of the litter,...
Recent studies have shown that the diversity of flowering plants can enhance pollinator richness and visitation frequency and thereby increase the resilience of pollination. It is assumed that flower traits explain these effects, but it is still unclear which flower traits are responsible, and knowing that, if pollinator richness and visitation frequency are more driven by mass‐ratio effects (mean...
The development of male secondary sexual characters such as antlers or horns has substantial biological and socio‐economic importance because in many species these traits affect male fitness positively through sexual selection and negatively through trophy hunting. Both environmental conditions and selective hunting can affect horn growth but their relative importance remains unexplored. We first...
The predator satiation hypothesis poses that synchronous and variable seed production during masting events increases seed escape through seed predator satiation. The success of this strategy depends upon the type of consumer functional response, in this case defined as the change in seed consumption rate by a predator as a function of change in seed density. Type II (where the proportion of seed...
Predator‐induced mortality rates are highest in early life stages; therefore, early recognition of threats can greatly increase survival chances. Some species of coral reef fishes have been frequently found to recruit back to their natal reefs; in this instance, there is a high chance of juveniles encountering their siblings, among other kin, after hatching. Kin recognition plays an important ecological...
Warming of the Arctic has resulted in earlier snowmelt and green‐up of plants in spring, potentially disrupting the synchrony between plant phenology and breeding phenology in herbivores. A negative relationship between offspring survival in West Greenland caribou and the timing of vegetation emergence was the first finding of such a mismatch in Arctic mammals. However, other studies indicate that...
Hybridization and introgression via interspecific gene flow are common processes in the plant kingdom. The effectiveness of these processes is governed by the strengths of multiple zygotic barriers. These barriers have often been quantified in artificial settings using laborious and time‐consuming hand‐pollination experiments, but their quantification is nonexistent in the landscape. In this study,...
Most spatial ecology focuses on how species dispersal affects community dynamics and coexistence. Ecosystems, however, are also commonly connected by flows of resources. We experimentally tested how neighbouring communities indirectly influence each other in absence of dispersal, via resource exchanges. Using two‐patch microcosm meta‐ecosystems, we manipulated community composition and dynamics, by...
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