Higher body condition with infection by parasites in Bananaquits ().

Parasite transmission is a heterogenous process in host-parasite interactions. This heterogeneity is particularly apparent in vector-borne parasite transmission where the vector adds an additional level of complexity. Haemosporidian parasites, a widespread protist, cause a malaria-like disease in birds globally, but we still have much to learn about the consequences of infection to hosts' health.

Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals.

Understanding variation in food web structure over large spatial scales is an emerging research agenda in food web ecology. The density of predator-prey links in a food web (i.e.

Recolonization of secondary forests by a locally extinct Caribbean anole through the lens of range expansion theory.

Disturbance and recovery dynamics are characteristic features of many ecosystems. Disturbance dynamics are widely studied in ecology and conservation biology. Still, we know less about the ecological processes that drive ecosystem recovery.

No evidence of predicted phenotypic changes after hurricane disturbance in a shade-specialist Caribbean anole.

Extreme climatic events (ECEs) such as hurricanes have been hypothesized to be a major driving force of natural selection. Recent studies argue that, following strong hurricane disturbance, lizards in the Caribbean undergo selection for traits such as longer forelimbs or smaller body sizes that improve their clinging ability to their substrates increasing their chances of surviving hurricane wind gusts. Some authors challenge the generalization of this hypothesis arguing that other mechanisms may explain these phenotypic changes or that they may not necessarily be generalizable across systems.

Teaching quantitative ecology online: An evidence-based prescription of best practices.

Quantitative skills are becoming central to the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in ecology and evolutionary biology. While previous studies acknowledge that students perceive their quantitative training to be inadequate, there is little guidance on best practices. Moreover, with the recent COVID-19 sudden transition to online learning, there is even less guidance on how to effectively teach quantitative ecology online.

Towards a unified framework for connectivity that disentangles movement and mortality in space and time.

Predicting connectivity, or how landscapes alter movement, is essential for understanding the scope for species persistence with environmental change. Although it is well known that movement is risky, connectivity modelling often conflates behavioural responses to the matrix through which animals disperse with mortality risk. We derive new connectivity models using random walk theory, based on the concept of spatial absorbing Markov chains.

Virulence-driven trade-offs in disease transmission: A meta-analysis.

The virulence-transmission trade-off hypothesis proposed more than 30 years ago is the cornerstone in the study of host-parasite co-evolution. This hypothesis rests on the premise that virulence is an unavoidable and increasing cost because the parasite uses host resources to replicate. This cost associated with replication ultimately results in a deceleration in transmission rate because increasing within-host replication increases host mortality.

The drivers and consequences of unstable dynamics: a long-term study of three malaria parasite species infecting a tropical lizard.

Understanding the consequences of environmental fluctuations for parasite dynamics requires a long-term view stretching over many transmission cycles. Here we studied the dynamics of three malaria parasites (Plasmodium azurophilum, P. leucocytica and P.

Spatial asymmetries in connectivity influence colonization-extinction dynamics.

Movement has broad implications for many areas of biology, including evolution, community and population ecology. Movement is crucial in metapopulation ecology because it facilitates colonization and reduces the likelihood of local extinction via rescue effects. Most metapopulation modeling approaches describe connectivity using pair-wise Euclidean distances resulting in the simplifying assumption of a symmetric connectivity pattern.

Spatial heterogeneity, host movement and mosquito-borne disease transmission.

Mosquito-borne diseases are a global health priority disproportionately affecting low-income populations in tropical and sub-tropical countries. These pathogens live in mosquitoes and hosts that interact in spatially heterogeneous environments where hosts move between regions of varying transmission intensity. Although there is increasing interest in the implications of spatial processes for mosquito-borne disease dynamics, most of our understanding derives from models that assume spatially homogeneous transmission.

The matrix alters the role of path redundancy on patch colonization rates.

Landscape connectivity is central to many problems in ecology and conservation. Recently, the role of path redundancies on movement of organisms has been emphasized for understanding connectivity, because increasing the number of potential paths (i.e.

Place-based attributes predict community membership in a mobile phone communication network.

Social networks can be organized into communities of closely connected nodes, a property known as modularity. Because diseases, information, and behaviors spread faster within communities than between communities, understanding modularity has broad implications for public policy, epidemiology and the social sciences. Explanations for community formation in social networks often incorporate the attributes of individual people, such as gender, ethnicity or shared activities.

Social network models predict movement and connectivity in ecological landscapes.

Network analysis is on the rise across scientific disciplines because of its ability to reveal complex, and often emergent, patterns and dynamics. Nonetheless, a growing concern in network analysis is the use of limited data for constructing networks. This concern is strikingly relevant to ecology and conservation biology, where network analysis is used to infer connectivity across landscapes.