Volume 5 Issue 8, August 2021

The future of SARS-CoV-2, including the possibility of elimination and eradication, remains uncertain, but much hinges on characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 immunity. The next few months to a year is a critical period for understanding these characteristics.

Global conceptions of Antarctica are dominated by colonial narratives despite an ostensibly collaborative paradigm. We argue that an Indigenous Māori framework centring relational thinking and connectedness, humans and non-human kin, and drawing on concepts of both reciprocity and responsibility, offers transformational insight into true collective management and conservation of Antarctica.

A new lower Cambrian fossil locality in South China offers spectacular glimpses into the post-larval development of a wide variety of soft-bodied early marine animals, knowledge of which has been confined to their mature stages until now.

The mathematics of counting holes reveals hidden paths to species coexistence and the obstacles that block the way.

Sperm length unexpectedly varies more than 3,000-fold across species, posing new questions for anisogamy theory and understanding the different forces shaping evolution of the male gamete.

Behavioural experiments and genetic manipulations reveal the mechanisms by which Drosophila females plastically alter their choosiness in response to mating, resolving trade-offs of mate choice.

This Perspective reviews the practical and conceptual challenges inherent in the development of crop variety mixtures, and considers three domains in which they might be particularly beneficial: pathogen resistance, yield stability and yield enhancement.

The authors report a new lower Cambrian Burgess Shale-type Lagerstätte from Haiyan, southwest China which preserves an unusually high number of juvenile and larval forms.

Drawing on theory from the field of mathematics known as topology, the authors characterize sets of species that can or cannot coexist in hypergraphs.

This paper demonstrates that the scaling relationship between the number of species and the number of interactions (links) in a network can explain its local stability and robustness to secondary extinctions.

The fraction of plant biomass in aboveground versus root tissues has implications for carbon storage and dynamics. Here the authors collate a dataset on root-mass fractions and use these data to explore large scale patterns of belowground plant biomass.

Scrutinizing the empirical evidence for bidirectional trade-offs in fine root traits, the authors show that while these are important in explaining species occurrences along broad temperature and water availability gradients, unidirectional benefits are prevalent.

Evidence for balancing selection acting on loci that control complex traits is limited. Here, the authors show evidence for past selection on chemical profile in a perennial wildflower by two ecological drivers, herbivory and drought, consistent with balancing selection on this trait.

A combination of simulations and empirical data shows that random fluctuations in species population time-series data affect calculations of the Living Planet Index, in some cases exaggerating population declines.

Sperm morphology is remarkably diverse across animals. A macro-evolutionary analysis of how fertilization mode influences sperm length shows shorter sperm in external fertilizers and spermcasters and a faster rate of evolution of sperm length in spermcasters and internal fertilizers.

This study shows that Drosophila melanogaster females are more selective after their first mating because mating triggers the increased release of juvenile hormone, which desensitizes the Or47b olfactory neurons to an aphrodisiac pheromone produced by males.

The authors assess the impact of Spanish colonization on forest dynamics across the tropics, finding variable responses according to regional land use strategies, as well as other cultural, social and biophysical factors.