Machine learning reveals singing rhythms of male Pacific field crickets are clock controlled.

Circadian rhythms are ubiquitous in nature and endogenous circadian clocks drive the daily expression of many fitness-related behaviors. However, little is known about whether such traits are targets of selection imposed by natural enemies. In Hawaiian populations of the nocturnally active Pacific field cricket (, males sing to attract mates, yet sexually selected singing rhythms are also subject to natural selection from the acoustically orienting and deadly parasitoid fly, .

Consistent traffic noise impacts few fitness-related traits in a field cricket.

Background: Anthropogenic habitat change is occurring rapidly, and organisms can respond through within-generation responses that improve the match between their phenotype and the novel conditions they encounter. But, plastic responses can be adaptive or maladaptive and are most likely to be adaptive only when contemporary conditions reasonably mimic something experienced historically to which a response has already evolved. Noise pollution is a ubiquitous anthropogenic stressor that accompanies expanding urbanization.

Synchrony between daily rhythms of malaria parasites and hosts is driven by an essential amino acid.

Rapid asexual replication of blood stage malaria parasites is responsible for the severity of disease symptoms and fuels the production of transmission forms. Here, we demonstrate that a  schedule for asexual replication can be orchestrated by isoleucine, a metabolite provided to the parasite in a periodic manner due to the host's rhythmic intake of food. We infect female C57BL/6 and Per1/2-null mice which have a disrupted canonical (transcription translation feedback loop, TTFL) clock with 1×10 red blood cells containing (DK genotype).

Prevalence and Coinfection of Three Tick-Borne Pathogens in Questing Adult Blacklegged Ticks (Vilas County, Wisconsin).

In North America, the blacklegged tick () is a vector of several human pathogens, and tick-borne disease incidence is increasing. We estimated the prevalence of questing blacklegged ticks vectoring three zoonotic pathogens in Vilas County, Wisconsin. We collected 461 adult blacklegged ticks and used PCR to screen for the presence of pathogens that cause Lyme disease (), human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA, ), and babesiosis ().

Testing possible causes of gametocyte reduction in temporally out-of-synch malaria infections.

Background: The intraerythrocytic development cycle (IDC) of the rodent malaria Plasmodium chabaudi is coordinated with host circadian rhythms. When this coordination is disrupted, parasites suffer a 50% reduction in both asexual stages and sexual stage gametocytes over the acute phase of infection. Reduced gametocyte density may not simply follow from a loss of asexuals because investment into gametocytes ("conversion rate") is a plastic trait; furthermore, the densities of both asexuals and gametocytes are highly dynamic during infection.

The evolutionary ecology of circadian rhythms in infection.

Biological rhythms coordinate organisms' activities with daily rhythms in the environment. For parasites, this includes rhythms in both the external abiotic environment and the within-host biotic environment. Hosts exhibit rhythms in behaviours and physiologies, including immune responses, and parasites exhibit rhythms in traits underpinning virulence and transmission.