Genetic loci coding for a toxin and its antidote behave like selfish elements. Two new studies find an accumulation of such elements in one species.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.037 | DOI Listing |
Evolution
January 2025
Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA.
Seed size is a trait which determines survival rates for individual plants and can vary as a result of numerous trade-offs. In the palm family (Arecaceae) today, there is great variation in seed sizes. Past studies attempting to establish drivers for palm seed evolution have sometimes yielded contradictory findings in part because modern seed size variations are complicated by long-term legacies, including biogeographic differences across lineages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Total Environ
January 2025
School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia; The Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia; Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate, GLOBE Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Center for Global Mountain Biodiversity, GLOBE Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Electronic address:
Human overexploitation contributed strongly to the loss of hundreds of bird species across Oceania, including nine giant, flightless birds called moa. The inevitability of anthropogenic moa extinctions in New Zealand has been fiercely debated. However, we can now rigorously evaluate their extinction drivers using spatially explicit demographic models capturing species-specific interactions between moa, natural climates and landscapes, and human colonists.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Data
January 2025
Yale University, Department of Anthropology, 10 Sachem Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA.
The diverse, highly endemic flora and fauna of Madagascar make it a priority for research and conservation. Lemurs, the island's endemic primates, exhibit a distinctive array of biological, behavioral and demographic traits. Research on these species contributes to significant theoretical issues, including the evolution of mammalian life histories and social systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcol Evol
January 2025
Laboratory of Genetics and Conservation, Institute of Coastal Studies Universidade Federal do Pará Bragança Pará Brazil.
This study aims to enhance our understanding of the temporal and spatial processes scales governing the evolutionary diversification of Neotropical birds with Trans- and Cis-Andean populations of the species from South and Central America. Through a multilocus analysis of the mitochondrial (CytB and ND2) and nuclear genes (I7BF, I5BF, and G3PDH) of 41 samples representing six subspecies, we describe the existing molecular lineages of , and estimate their demographic dynamics. We used Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) with six different algorithms to predict the potential distribution of in both present-day and past scenarios, examining the overlap climatic niche between Cis- and Trans-Andean lineages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcology
January 2025
Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland, USA.
Disease is a key driver of community and ecosystem structure, especially when it strikes foundation species. In the widespread marine foundation species eelgrass (Zostera marina), outbreaks of wasting disease have caused large-scale meadow collapse in the past, and the causative pathogen, Labyrinthula zosterae, is commonly found in meadows globally. Research to date has mainly focused on abiotic environmental drivers of seagrass wasting disease, but there is strong evidence from other systems that biotic interactions such as herbivory can facilitate plant diseases.
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