Population links between an insectivorous bird and moths disentangled through national-scale monitoring data.

Insects are key components of food chains, and monitoring data provides new opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales. Here, combining two monitoring datasets from Great Britain, we reveal how the population dynamics of the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus are influenced by the abundance of moths - a core component of their breeding diet. We find that years with increased population growth for blue tits correlate strongly with high moth abundance, but population growth in moths and birds is less well correlated; suggesting moth abundance directly affects bird population change.

Mechanisms underpinning community stability along a latitudinal gradient: Insights from a niche-based approach.

At large scales, the mechanisms underpinning stability in natural communities may vary in importance due to changes in species composition, mean abundance, and species richness. Here we link species characteristics (niche positions) and community characteristics (richness and abundance) to evaluate the importance of stability mechanisms in 156 butterfly communities monitored across three European countries and spanning five bioclimatic regions. We construct niche-based hierarchical structural Bayesian models to explain first differences in abundance, population stability, and species richness between the countries, and then explore how these factors impact community stability both directly and indirectly (via synchrony and population stability).

Characterizing the trophy hunting debate on Twitter.

Social media is an arena of debate for contentious political and social topics. One conservation topic debated online is the acceptability of trophy hunting, a debate that has implications for national and international policy. We used a mixed-methods approach (grounded theory and quantitative clustering) to identify themes in the trophy hunting debate on Twitter.

The influence of chalk grasslands on butterfly phenology and ecology.

The influence of large-scale variables such as climate change on phenology has received a great deal of research attention. However, local environmental factors also play a key role in determining the timing of species life cycles. Using the meadow brown butterfly as an example, we investigate how a specific habitat type, lowland calcareous grassland, can affect the timing of flight dates.

Associations between COVID-19 transmission rates, park use, and landscape structure.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe impacts on global public health. In England, social distancing measures and a nationwide lockdown were introduced to reduce the spread of the virus. Green space accessibility may have been particularly important during this lockdown, as it could have provided benefits for physical and mental wellbeing.

Behavior underpins the predictive power of a trait-based model of butterfly movement.

Dispersal ability is key to species persistence in times of environmental change. Assessing a species' vulnerability and response to anthropogenic changes is often performed using one of two methods: correlative approaches that infer dispersal potential based on traits, such as wingspan or an index of mobility derived from expert opinion, or a mechanistic modeling approach that extrapolates displacement rates from empirical data on short-term movements.Here, we compare and evaluate the success of the correlative and mechanistic approaches using a mechanistic random-walk model of butterfly movement that incorporates relationships between wingspan and sex-specific movement behaviors.

The importance of including habitat-specific behaviour in models of butterfly movement.

Dispersal is a key process affecting population persistence and major factors affecting dispersal rates are the amounts, connectedness and properties of habitats in landscapes. We present new data on the butterfly Maniola jurtina in flower-rich and flower-poor habitats that demonstrates how movement and behaviour differ between sexes and habitat types, and how this effects consequent dispersal rates. Females had higher flight speeds than males, but their total time in flight was four times less.

Phenological responses in a sycamore-aphid-parasitoid system and consequences for aphid population dynamics: A 20 year case study.

Species interactions have a spatiotemporal component driven by environmental cues, which if altered by climate change can drive shifts in community dynamics. There is insufficient understanding of the precise time windows during which inter-annual variation in weather drives phenological shifts and the consequences for mismatches between interacting species and resultant population dynamics-particularly for insects. We use a 20 year study on a tri-trophic system: sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus, two associated aphid species Drepanosiphum platanoidis and Periphyllus testudinaceus and their hymenopteran parasitoids.

Integrating the influence of weather into mechanistic models of butterfly movement.

Background: Understanding the factors influencing movement is essential to forecasting species persistence in a changing environment. Movement is often studied using mechanistic models, extrapolating short-term observations of individuals to longer-term predictions, but the role of weather variables such as air temperature and solar radiation, key determinants of ectotherm activity, are generally neglected. We aim to show how the effects of weather can be incorporated into individual-based models of butterfly movement thus allowing analysis of their effects.

Vertically transmitted rhabdoviruses are found across three insect families and have dynamic interactions with their hosts.

A small number of free-living viruses have been found to be obligately vertically transmitted, but it remains uncertain how widespread vertically transmitted viruses are and how quickly they can spread through host populations. Recent metagenomic studies have found several insects to be infected with sigma viruses (Rhabdoviridae). Here, we report that sigma viruses that infect Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata), Drosophila immigrans, and speckled wood butterflies (Pararge aegeria) are all vertically transmitted.