Human-driven evolution of color in a stonefly mimic.

Rapid adaptation is thought to be critical for the survival of species under global change, but our understanding of human-induced evolution in the wild remains limited. We show that widespread deforestation has underpinned repeated color shifts in wild insect populations. Specifically, loss of forest has led to color changes across lineages that mimic the warning coloration of a toxic forest stonefly.

Freshwater eDNA reveals dramatic biological shifts linked to deforestation of New Zealand.

Deforestation is considered a major threat to biodiversity across many parts of the globe, but the biological impacts of this dramatic ecosystem disturbance often remain incompletely understood. In New Zealand - the world's last major landmass to be colonised by humans - widespread deforestation over recent centuries has left a highly fragmented suite of relict forest stands, ideal for assessing anthropogenic biological change. We hypothesise that this widespread environmental disturbance has underpinned repeated and predictable ecological shifts across distinct rivers and regions.

Functional and sex-specific dynamics of ectoparasite size evolution in marine isopod-fish interactions: Harrison's rule and increasing variance.

Harrison's rule, a pattern predicting that the body size of parasites correlates positively with the size of their hosts, is well-supported. However, its interaction with highly distinct "guilds" of closely related parasites warrants further exploration. The increasing variance hypothesis predicts that the variance in parasite size should also increase with the size of their hosts.

The rise of big data in disease ecology.

Big data have become readily available to explore patterns in large-scale disease ecology. However, the rate at which these public databases are exploited remains unknown. We highlight trends in big data usage in disease ecology during the past decade and encourage researchers to integrate big data into their study framework.