Metabolically similar cohorts of bacteria exhibit strong cooccurrence patterns with diet items and eukaryotic microbes in lizard guts.

Gut microbiomes perform essential services for their hosts, including helping them to digest food and manage pathogens and parasites. Performing these services requires a diverse and constantly changing set of metabolic functions from the bacteria in the microbiome. The metabolic repertoire of the microbiome is ultimately dependent on the outcomes of the ecological interactions of its member microbes, as these interactions in part determine the taxonomic composition of the microbiome.

Anolis lizards as biocontrol agents in mainland and island agroecosystems.

Our knowledge of ecological interactions that bolster ecosystem function and productivity has broad applications to the management of agricultural systems. Studies suggest that the presence of generalist predators in agricultural landscapes leads to a decrease in the abundance of herbivorous pests, but our understanding of how these interactions vary across taxa and along gradients of management intensity and eco-geographic space remains incomplete. In this study, we assessed the functional response and biocontrol potential of a highly ubiquitous insectivore (lizards in the genus ) on the world's most important coffee pest, the coffee berry borer ().

From endogenous to exogenous pattern formation: Invasive plant species changes the spatial distribution of a native ant.

Invasive species are a significant threat to global biodiversity, but our understanding of how invasive species impact native communities across space and time remains limited. Based on observations in an old field in Southeast Michigan spanning 35 years, our study documents significant impacts of habitat change, likely driven by the invasion of the shrub, Elaeagnus umbellata, on the nest distribution patterns and population demographics of a native ant species, Formica obscuripes. Landcover change in aerial photographs indicates that E.