Effects of the nematode subsp. and beech leaf disease on leaf fungal and bacterial communities on (American beech).

Unlabelled: Beech leaf disease (BLD) is a newly emerging disease in North America that affects American beech (). It is increasingly recognized that BLD is caused by a subspecies of the anguinid nematode subsp. (hereafter ) which is likely native to East Asia.

A low-cost, open-source evolutionary bioreactor and its educational use.

A morbidostat is a bioreactor that uses antibiotics to control the growth of bacteria, making it well-suited for studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance. However, morbidostats are often too expensive to be used in educational settings. Here we present a low-cost morbidostat called the EVolutionary biorEactor (EVE) that can be built by students with minimal engineering and programming experience.

In a nutshell, a reciprocal transplant experiment reveals local adaptation and fitness trade-offs in response to urban evolution in an acorn-dwelling ant.

Urban-driven evolution is widely evident, but whether these changes confer fitness benefits and thus represent adaptive urban evolution is less clear. We performed a multiyear field reciprocal transplant experiment of acorn-dwelling ants across urban and rural environments. Fitness responses were consistent with local adaptation: we found a survival advantage of the "home" and "local" treatments compared to "away" and "foreign" treatments.

Pedal to the metal: Cities power evolutionary divergence by accelerating metabolic rate and locomotor performance.

Metabolic rates of ectotherms are expected to increase with global trends of climatic warming. But the potential for rapid, compensatory evolution of lower metabolic rate in response to rising temperatures is only starting to be explored. Here, we explored rapid evolution of metabolic rate and locomotor performance in acorn-dwelling ants () in response to urban heat island effects.

Remarkable insensitivity of acorn ant morphology to temperature decouples the evolution of physiological tolerance from body size under urban heat islands.

Environmental temperature can alter body size and thermal tolerance, yet the effects of temperature rise on the size-tolerance relationship remain unclear. Terrestrial ectotherms with larger body sizes typically exhibit greater tolerance of high (and low) temperatures. However, while warming tends to increase tolerance of high temperatures through phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary change, warming tends to decrease body size through these mechanisms and thus might indirectly contribute to worse tolerance of high temperatures.