• Inflorescence architecture is important to angiosperm reproduction, but our knowledge of the developmental basis underlying the evolution of inflorescence architectures is limited. Using a phylogeny-based comparative analysis of developmental pathways, we tested the long-standing hypothesis that umbel evolved from elongated inflorescences by suppression of inflorescence branches, while head evolved ...

Ecology letters (2011) ABSTRACT: Islands acquire species through immigration and speciation. Models of island biogeography should capture both processes; however quantitative island biogeography theory has either neglected speciation or treated it unrealistically. We introduce a model where the dominance of immigration on small and near islands gives way to an ...

A standard metric of measurement precision in environmental monitoring is the variance of differences between duplicate (collocated) samples. With duplicate measurements of multiple species, we can extend this variance analysis to include the interspecies covariance of differences between duplicate samples; these covariances can provide clues about the sources of error. ...

  Estimating the abundance of migratory species is difficult because sources of variability differ substantially among species and populations. Recently developed state-space models address this variability issue by directly modeling both environmental and measurement error, although their efficacy in detecting declines is relatively untested for empirical data. We applied state-space ...

A great proportion of bats of the New World family Phyllostomidae feed on fruit, nectar and pollen, and many of them present adaptations to feed also on insects and small vertebrates. So far, attempts to examine the diversification of feeding specialization in this group, and particularly the evolution of nectarivory ...

In this paper, I develop efficient tools to simulate trees with a fixed number of extant species. The tools are provided in my open source R-package TreeSim available on CRAN. The new model presented here is a constant rate birth-death process with mass extinction and/or rate shift events at arbitrarily ...

The purpose of this study is to conduct a long-term site-specific risk assessment for zinc (Zn) susceptibility of bivalves, green mussel Perna viridis and hard clam Ruditapes philippinarum, based on published experimental data by linking the biologically-based damage assessment model with the subcellular partitioning concept. A comprehensive risk modeling framework ...

Concern about the impact of sound on marine mammals has increased over the last decade, causing governments to take a more rigorous look at the potential impact of activities that introduce sound into the ocean. Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) can be prepared using differing analysis methods to estimate the impact ...

Aim:  To assess the persistence and diversity of faecal bacterial populations (faecal coliforms and enterococci) that have recently been included in microbial source tracking (MST) predictive models. Methods and Results:  The analysed bacterial populations included members of the enterococci group (ENT) (Ent. faecium (FM), Ent. faecalis (FS), and Ent. hirae ...

Predation is a fundamental process in the interaction between species, and exerts strong selection pressure. Hence, anti-predatory traits have been intensively studied. Although it has long been speculated that individuals of some species gain protection from predators by sometimes almost-uncanny resemblances to uninteresting objects in the local environment (such as ...

The current epidemic of the mountain pine beetle (MPB), an indigenous pest of western North American pine, has resulted in significant losses of lodgepole pine. The leading edge has reached Alberta where forest composition shifts from lodgepole to jack pine through a hybrid zone. The susceptibility of jack pine to ...

Evolutionary biologists have long debated the relative influence of species selection on evolutionary patterns. As a test, we apply a statistical phylogenetic approach to evaluate the influence of traits related to species distribution and life-history characteristics on patterns of diversification in salamanders. We use independent contrasts to test trait-mediated diversification ...

Individual specialisation can lead to the exploitation of different trophic and habitat resources and the production of morphological variability within a population. Although the ecological causes of this phenomenon are relatively well known, its consequences on individual fitness are less recognised. We have investigated the extent of individual specialisation in ...

A method exists to predict heavy-duty vehicle fuel economy and emissions over an "unseen" cycle or during unseen on-road activity on the basis of fuel consumption and emissions data from measured chassis dynamometer test cycles and properties (statistical parameters) of those cycles. No regression is required for the method, which ...

We apply a dynamic energy budget (DEB) model to the Icelandic capelin (Mallotus villosus) and introduce a new state variable to capture the roe production of individual fish. Species-specific coefficients are found for the capelin such as the shape coefficient and the Arrhenius temperature. We show how to link the ...

For many organisms, stage is a better predictor of demographic rates than age. Yet no general theoretical framework exists for understanding or predicting evolution in stage-structured populations. Here, we provide a general modeling approach that can be used to predict evolution and demography of stage-structured populations. This advances our ability ...

Abstract Biotic homogenization, the loss of local biotic distinctiveness among locations (beta diversity), is a form of global change that can result from the widespread introduction of nonnative species. Here, we model this process using only species' occupancy rates-the proportion of sites they occupy-without reference to their spatial arrangement. The ...

Cover: A local boy spearfishing in Wakatobi Marine National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia, 2004. Octopus, grouper, fusilier, and scorpionfish commonly are fished in the area. Customary management systems that limit fishing can increase the biomass of fishes targeted by local fishers. Feary et al. (pp. 341-349) found that customary closures affect ...

Biological control of rice weevil, Sitophilus oryzae (L.), and Indianmeal moth, Plodia interpunctella (Hübner), by their parasitoids Anisopteromalus calandrae (Howard) and Bracon hebetor Say was examined while considering the intraspecific competition pattern of the pests. In both experimental and simulation studies, A. calandrae was shown to suppress the rice weevil ...

Mass mortality events are relatively uncommon in commercially fished populations, but when they occur, they reduce production and degrade ecosystems. Observing and documenting mass mortalities is simpler than quantifying the impact on stocks, monitoring or predicting recovery, and re-establishing commercial fishing. Direct survey measures of abundance, distribution and harvestable biomass ...

Abstract Ecological divergence and selection for novel adaptations to new habitats have been theoretically proposed to play important roles in promoting homoploid hybrid speciation (HHS). The successful establishment of Pinus densata on the Tibetan Plateau is one of the few known examples of HHS. In this study, we carried out ...

Phylogenetic relationships of the monocot family Hypoxidaceae (Asparagales), which occurs mainly in the Southern Hemisphere, were reconstructed using four plastid DNA regions (rbcL, trnL intron, trnL-F intergenic spacer, and trnS-G intergenic spacer) for 56 ingroup taxa including all currently accepted genera and seven species of the closely related families Asteliaceae, ...

Most species pairs are isolated through the collective action of a suite of barriers. Recent work has shown that cryptic barriers such as conspecific sperm precedence can be quite strong, suggesting that they evolve quickly. However, because the strength of multiple barriers has been formally quantified in very few systems, ...

PURPOSE: Approaches in environmental risk assessment for pesticides are becoming more and more realistic. Thereby, risk assessment has to be protective in a way that no long-lasting (adverse) effects on populations will occur in the environment. Since this imperative includes species generally showing high population vulnerability due to their life ...

We investigate a spatial lattice model of a population employing dispersal to nearest and second-nearest neighbors, as well as long-distance dispersal across the landscape. The model is studied via stochastic spatial simulations, ordinary pair approximation, and triplet approximation. The latter method, which uses the probabilities of state configurations of contiguous ...

In this study, we develop a distance method for inferring unrooted species trees from a collection of unrooted gene trees. The species tree is estimated by the neighbor joining (NJ) tree built from a distance matrix in which the distance between two species is defined as the average number of ...

Habitat fragmentation due to human activities is one of the most important causes of biodiversity loss. In Mediterranean areas the species have co-evolved with traditional farming, which has recently been replaced for more severe and aggressive practices. We use a methodological approach that enables the evaluation of the impact that ...

In order to assess the relationship between the oppiid mite species (Acari, Oribatida) collected from Turkey, traditional and geometric morphometric methods were used. We have taken photographs of 128 specimens belonging to 11 species from six subfamilies of Oppiidae. These photographs were digitized and 17 interval measurements were taken for ...

In popular use of Bayesian phylogenetics, a default branch-length prior is almost universally applied without knowing how a different prior would have affected the outcome. We performed Bayesian and maximum likelihood (ML) inference of phylogeny based on empirical nucleotide sequence data from a family of lichenized ascomycetes, the Psoraceae, the ...

Fisheries bycatch is a recognized threat to marine megafauna. Addressing bycatch of pelagic species however is challenging owing to the dynamic nature of marine environments and vagility of these organisms. In order to assess the potential for species to overlap with fisheries, we propose applying dynamic habitat models to determine ...

The conditional expression of alternative phenotypes underlies the production of almost all life history decisions and many dichotomous traits [1-6], including male alternative reproductive morphs and behavioral tactics [7]. Changes in tactic fitness should lead to evolutionary shifts in developmental switch points that underlie tactic expression [8]. We used experimental ...

In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out a comparative study of an interacting particle system and ...

Population extinction is a fundamental biological process with applications to ecology, epidemiology, immunology, conservation biology and genetics. Although a monotonic relationship between initial population size and mean extinction time is predicted by virtually all theoretical models, attempts at empirical demonstration have been equivocal. We suggest that this anomaly is best ...

Understanding the relationship between disturbance regimes and species diversity has been of central interest to ecologists for decades. For example, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis proposes that diversity will be highest at intermediate levels of disturbance. Although peaked (hump-shaped) diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs) have been documented in nature, many other DDRs have ...

Development of methods for estimating species trees from multilocus data is a current challenge in evolutionary biology. We propose a method for estimating the species tree topology and branch lengths using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). The method takes as data a sample of observed rooted gene tree topologies, and then ...

Chorioptes mites (Acari: Psoroptidae) are non-burrowing agents of mange which parasitize a wide range of domesticated and wild ungulates. Considerable historical confusion has surrounded the description and naming of the various species of Chorioptes. Here, the opisthosomal setae of male adult Chorioptes mites from a range of host species and ...

We find the evolutionarily stable dispersal behaviour of a population that inhabits a heterogeneous environment where patches differ in safety (the probability that a juvenile individual survives until reproduction) and productivity (the total competitive weight of offspring produced by the local individual), assuming that these characteristics do not change over ...

In this study, on the basis of empirical data, we have simulated the foraging tunnel patterns of two subterranean termites, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki and Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar), using a two-dimensional model. We have defined a territory as a convex polygon containing a tunnel pattern and explored the effects of competition ...

Ladybird beetles (family Coccinellidae) are a species-rich, ecologically diverse group of substantial agricultural significance, yet have been consistently problematic to classify, with evolutionary relationships poorly understood. In order to identify major clades within Coccinellidae, evaluate the current classification system, and identify likely drivers of diversification in this polyphagous group, we ...

The increase in biodiversity from high to low latitudes is a widely recognized biogeographical pattern. According to the latitudinal gradient hypothesis (LGH), this pattern was shaped by differential effects of Late Quaternary climatic changes across a latitudinal gradient. Here, we evaluate the effects of climatic changes across a tropical latitudinal ...

Multiple mating or group spawning leads to post-copulatory sexual selection, which generally favours ejaculates that are more competitive under sperm competition. In four meta-analyses we quantify the evidence that sperm competition (SC) favours greater sperm number using data from studies of strategic ejaculation. Differential investment into each ejaculate emerges at ...

To infer a phylogenetic tree from a set of DNA sequences, typically a multiple alignment is first used to obtain homologous bases. The inferred phylogeny can be very sensitive to how the alignment was created. We develop tools for analyzing the robustness of phylogeny to perturbations in alignment parameters in ...

Size-related traits are common targets of natural selection, yet there is a relative paucity of data on selection among mammals, particularly from studies measuring lifetime reproductive success (LRS). We present the first phenotypic selection analysis using LRS on size-related traits in a large terrestrial carnivore, the spotted hyena, which displays ...

Road-killed mammals, birds, and reptiles were collected weekly from highways in southern Brazil in 2002 and 2005. The objective was to assess variation in estimates of road-kill impacts on species richness produced by different sampling efforts, and to provide information to aid in the experimental design of future sampling. Richness ...

Alternative energy development is increasing, potentially leading to negative impacts on wildlife populations already stressed by other factors. Resource managers require a scientifically based methodology to balance energy development and species conservation, so we investigated modeling habitat suitability using Maximum Entropy to develop maps that could be used with other ...

In this review, we will discuss the recent literature on fish polarization vision and we will present a model on how the retina processes polarization signals. The model is based on a general retinal-processing scheme and will be compared with the available electrophysiological data on polarization processing in the retina. ...

There is increasing evidence of physical interactions (association) among cytochromes P450 in the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum. Functional consequences of these interactions are often underestimated. AREAS COVERED: This article provides a comprehensive overview of available experimental material regarding P450-P450 interactions. Special emphasis is given to the interactions between different ...

On the ecological timescale, two predator species with linear functional responses can stably coexist on two competing prey species. In this paper, with the methods of adaptive dynamics and critical function analysis, we investigate under what conditions such a coexistence is also evolutionarily stable, and whether the two predator species ...

The decline of sharks in the global oceans underscores the need for careful assessment and monitoring of remaining populations. The northeastern Pacific is the home range for a genetically distinct clade of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). Little is known about the conservation status of this demographically isolated population, concentrated seasonally ...

Phylogenetic relationships and taxonomic distinctiveness of closely related species and subspecies are most accurately inferred from data derived from multiple independent loci. Here, we apply several approaches for understanding species-level relationships using data from 18 nuclear DNA loci and 1 mitochondrial DNA locus within currently described species and subspecies of ...