Blog

Image: Katrina Jones, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Cover Design: Lauren Heslop.

Proteomic analysis of human dental calculus finds evidence that ruminant dairying was accompanied with eastward human migration into Central Mongolia about 5,000 years ago and horse milk consumption was a part of the economic transformation in Mongolia around 1200 bc.

A new model suggests that energetic costs of development are minimized within narrow ranges of temperature. Temperatures below an optimum raise costs by extending development times more than metabolic rates are depressed, whereas temperatures above the optimum cause development rates to stall even as metabolic rates rise.

Slow ecological cycles, resulting in the recurrent dispersal of cells between resource patches, can drive the evolution of collectivity.

Time lags in the response of species to conservation interventions may mask success. In this Perspective, the authors explore the effects of time lags on biodiversity indicators using both theory and empirical data.

Ancient Salmonella enterica genomes from Neolithic Eurasian humans compared with those from later archaeological contexts illuminate the evolving host specificity of the pathogen from an initial multi-mammalian adaptation towards an increasingly human specialization.

The history of human populations in the islands of the central and western Mediterranean is poorly understood. Here, the authors generate ancient-DNA data from the Balearic Islands, Sicily and Sardinia, and estimate the level and timing of steppe pastoralist, Iranian and North African ancestries in these populations.

Ancient proteins in human dental calculus from sites across Mongolia spanning 5,000 years suggest dairy consumption on the eastern Eurasian steppe by circa 3000 bc, and the later emergence of horse milking at circa 1200 bc, concurrent with the first evidence for horse riding.

A model of community assembly that is sequential and has saturating benefits of mutualism produces communities with internal stability for any level of diversity, and for which external stability depends on the balance of interaction types.

By quantifying metabolic interactions between individual cells in synthetic microbial communities, the authors show that interactions are extremely localized, and that the spatial scale of interactions influences community dynamics.

Analysing communities of soil bacteria under differing nutrient concentrations, the authors show that extensive growth with high levels of nutrients results in stronger interactions among species, leading to declines in biodiversity and stability.

By analysing changes in occupancy among >5,000 species of invertebrates, bryophytes and lichens in the United Kingdom over the past 45 years, the authors find substantial turnover in community composition among all groups, although average declines are evident only among terrestrial non-insect invertebrates.

Applying the concept of ecosystem energetics to a grassland biodiversity experiment, the authors show that the storage and flow of energy across the whole trophic network, both above- and belowground, becomes more efficient as plant diversity increases.

A physiological model that defines the window for which the cost of metazoan development is minimized is used to predict which species will be most at risk from global warming.

Incorporating evolutionary dynamics into a population model, the authors show that, even though changing ecological conditions are not enough to induce an immediate regime shift in the system, selection-induced evolutionary responses acting on a phenotypic trait may eventually cause a regime shift by pushing it beyond a tipping point after a substantial delay.

By competing native and invasive grass species in the California Floristic Province, the authors show that native species resist invasion by evolving to compete for resources used by the invader, rather than the two species co-evolving to differentiate their resource use.

Mathematical models are used to explore how individual cells can transition towards multicellular groups that are subject to Darwinian processes.

A chromosomal-barcoding technique is used to study the evolutionary dynamics of approximately 450,000 distinct Escherichia coli lineages at sub-inhibitory antibiotic levels.

The genetic mechanisms underlying the benefits of sex are unclear. Experimental evolution in sexual and asexual diploid populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae shows that overdominant mutations are beneficial in asexual populations but stay at lower frequencies in sexual populations due to segregation load.

Evolution experiments with Saccharomyces cerevisiae in changing and constant environments show that antagonistic pleiotropy can conceal molecular adaptations in changing environments.

Applying vertebral form–function relationships derived from extant animals to the synapsid fossil record indicates evolution of vertebral regions is decoupled from their functional exploitation.

Analysing data on group size and breeding systems of >4,700 species of birds, the authors show that complex sociality is more likely to arise in cooperative family groups than groups with unrelated individuals.