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In drylands, there are unique mechanisms that influence multiple ecosystem processes. In this Perspective, the authors identify these dryland mechanisms and show that they could become more important in non-dryland regions or areas that will become drier in the future.
Longitudinal data spanning 43 years from a wild ungulate population reveal changes in social connectedness as individuals age, and suggest that these changes may in part be driven by changes in spatial behaviour.
Mating in insects relies on pheromone production in just one of the sexes. A multidisciplinary study on the German cockroach identifies a gene that connects sex differentiation factors with the production of sexual pheromones in females only.
An experiment in secondary forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo finds that calcium, an overlooked soil nutrient, is scarcer than phosphorus, and represents a potentially greater limitation on tropical forest growth.
Pharaoh ants live in highly organized colonies with elaborate social structure. An atlas of the brain cells of the different sexes and social groups of this ant reveals cell compositions tailored to the tasks performed by each group.
Longitudinal data on gut microbiomes of wild baboons show that microbial communities are highly individualized, despite shared diet and environment within primate social groups.
Whole-genome sequencing and comparative omics analyses highlight recent and parallel paths to adaptive evolution involving expansions in zinc-binding proteins in the genomes of diverse cold-adapted algae.
As extremely large microbial community datasets have proliferated, numerous approaches to studying their ecological properties have emerged. In this Review, the authors offer a guide to five ecological modelling techniques used to study complex microbial communities.
Examining the evolutionary history of ungulate migration shows that this behaviour has evolved multiple times in response to grassland expansion and increased seasonality of resources.
Analysis of sediment and pore water from three seagrass meadows around the world reveals an unexpected accumulation of labile carbon in the marine rhizosphere, explained by sediment chemistry.
A computational method that negates the need to directly measure species interactions provides evidence in support of classic theory, stating that microbial communities with higher diversity remain stable as long they have low complexity and weaker interactions.
For decades, the origin of mitochondria during eukaryogenesis has been viewed as a response to Earth’s oxygenation, but this has been challenged by more recent research. Here, the authors review recent literature, concluding that eukaryogenesis and the rise of oxygen were decoupled, and obligate aerosis in eukaryotes has only become widespread in the past 1 billion years
Ocean afforestation is a proposed method for large-scale carbon dioxide removal, involving exporting rafts of nearshore macroalgae to the open ocean for long-term occupation and then sinking. In this Perspective, the authors caution that this approach has multiple potential ramifications for ocean chemistry and ecology.
Simultaneous evolution of vaccine-induced immune escape and virulence leads to different evolutionary end points, depending on the type of vaccine-induced protection.
An analysis of phenotypic skew — the asymmetrical distributions of traits — explores how it can bias estimates of inheritance and selection, and how to correct for those biases.
Combining pantropical fish community surveys with bioenergetic models has revealed the global distribution of reef-fish ecosystem functions, and that trade-offs linked to demographic and trophic structure prevent any community from maximizing all functions simultaneously.
A framework to experimentally traverse the large space of functionally neutral variants in a toxin–antitoxin protein complex reveals insights on evolvability and entrenchment of molecular interactions.
Analysis of the dynamics of transposons that encode resistance to different antibiotics shows that the movement of genes under positive selection from the chromosome to mobile genetic elements such as plasmids can be beneficial in bacteria. Once integrated into plasmids, these genes can spread by horizontal gene transfer.
