Publications by authors named "R Baeta"
Article Synopsis
- Agricultural areas are crucial ecosystems that often experience reduced biodiversity due to intensive farming practices, but the extent of their impact on surrounding natural systems is not well understood.
- This study focused on the diversity of Odonates (damselflies and dragonflies) in wetlands near agricultural landscapes in France, using data from citizen scientists over 10 years, involving 7,731 observations across 729 water bodies.
- Results showed that intensive agriculture significantly reduces species richness of both damselflies and dragonflies at varying distances, with the effect being stronger for autochthonous species, highlighting the need for conservation strategies that consider agricultural impacts over broader spatial scales.
The control of primary sex-ratio by vertebrates has become a major focus in biology in recent years. Evolutionary theory predicts that a differential effect of maternal characteristics on the fitness of sons and daughters is an important route, whereby selection is expected to favour a bias towards the production of one sex. However, despite experimental evidence for adaptive brood sex-ratio manipulation, support for this prediction remains a major challenge in vertebrates where inconsistencies between correlative studies are frequently reported.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany parasites depress the expression of the carotenoid-based colour displays of their hosts, and it has been hypothesized that animals face a trade-off in carotenoid allocation between immune functions and 'degree of ornamentation'. While numerous correlative studies suggest that parasite infection decreases the intensity of carotenoid-based colour displays, the existence of this trade-off has never been demonstrated experimentally in a host-parasite model. In this study, we used the blackbird (Turdus merula) and Isospora (an intestinal parasite) to assess whether this trade-off does indeed exist.
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