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By simulating experimentally the extinction of three key grazer species from an intertidal community, the authors show that the contribution of individual species to different dimensions of ecological stability is highly context dependent, and may simultaneously be positive or negative.
On the basis of a soil-conditioning experiment, the authors show that while alien plant species are not more competitive than natives when growing in other native soil legacies or non-conditioned soils, they outcompete natives under soil legacies from other alien species, their growth being less negatively affected than those of native species. This points to an invasional meltdown as invasive species increase in presence and abundance.
Analysing >40 plant traits and ecosystem properties over 10 years, the authors find moderate evidence for traits being predictors of ecosystem-level properties within years, but limited evidence for any effect across years.
Quantitative trait loci mapping of a cross between red junglefowl and domestic chickens provides evidence for the role of methylation in regulating gene expression in the domestication process.
The causes of epistasis in nature are poorly understood. Measuring the genetic basis of cryptic colouration and survival in a field experiment with stick insects, the authors show that epistasis results from ecological variation in natural selection.
Analysing responses of biodiversity to changes in land use and climate across global ecoregions, the authors identify strong negative responses in both tropical and Mediterranean biomes, driven primarily by low climatic seasonality and the history of human disturbance.
Analysing a global metagenomic data set from the Tara Oceans expeditions, the authors find that the distribution of marine giant virus communities is tightly coupled to that of eukaryotic microorganisms, that these communities are particularly distinct in polar biomes, and that they may sometimes be highly similar both on the surface and at depth.
Minjinia turgenensis, an Early Devonian fish, preserves anatomical details consistent with it being a stem gnathostome, but also endochondral bone similar to that of osteichthyans. These findings suggest that endochondral bone is an ancestral condition subsequently lost in chondrichthyans.
Theory, simulations and empirical data are used to show that the phenotypic effect of a mutation varies substantially depending on the specific genetic background, thereby resolving an apparent contradiction between predictions of convex and concave fitness landscapes.
By combining an analysis of common garden and field experiments, together with a survey of wild hosts, the authors show that prior infection by a plant fungal parasite increases susceptibility to infection by other strains and that this priming effect influences the assembly of the parasite community.
Using a food systems approach, the authors show that scientifically guided insect biological control mitigated 43 pest targets between 1918 and 2018 in the Asia–Pacific region, allowing for yield-loss recoveries of up to 73–100% in non-rice critical crops, with strong impacts on rural economies.
Experimental evolution shows that epimutations driven by small silencing RNAs in the nematode Caenorhabditiselegans arise rapidly but most have limited stability, suggesting that these epimutations might contribute to evolutionary processes over a short timescale.
Examining skeletal traits within a time-calibrated phylogeny, the authors find that ocean geochemistry (particularly aragonite–calcite seas) has driven patterns of morphological evolution in anthozoans (corals, sea anemones) over time.
The authors infer that pelvic skeleton reduction in a fossil sequence of the Miocene stickleback fish, Gasterosteus doryssus, proceeds through the same gene of large effect and a similar suite of genes of small effect as in a closely related extant species, Gasterosteusaculeatus.
This study reports the depletion of young Neandertal and Denisovan introgressed SNPs from gene regulatory enhancers in modern human genomes, as well as an association of enhancer pleiotropy with both the magnitude of archaic SNP depletion and the degree of intolerance to new mutations.
By comparing data from real-world grassland communities with data from two of the longest-running grassland biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments, the authors show that conclusions derived from experimental systems are robust to the removal of unrealistic experimental communities.
The utility of the threshold paradigm, such that relatively small perturbations drive abrupt ecosystem changes, is challenged by a synthesis of 36 meta-analyses, which detected few signatures of thresholds from over 4,600 global change impacts on natural ecological communities.
Analysing global high-resolution three-dimensional maps of forest structure, the authors show that only half of the world’s remaining moist tropical forest has both high structural integrity and low human pressure, and they outline a framework for its conservation and restoration.
By exposing an experimental 34-species bacterial community to different levels of pulse antibiotic disturbance with or without immigration, the authors identify a highly repeatable community response, the magnitude of which increases with increasing antibiotic levels.