Predicting and anticipating rapid evolution.

Human impacts alter species interactions and evolutionary dynamics in wild populations.

Unexpected Delayed Incursion of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 (Clade 2.3.4.4b) Into the Antarctic Region.

The current highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 panzootic is having substantial impacts on wild birds and marine mammals. Following major and widespread outbreaks in South America, an incursion to Antarctica occurred late in the austral summer of 2023/2024 and was confined to the region of the Antarctic Peninsula. To infer potential underlying processes, we compiled H5N1 surveillance data from Antarctica and sub-Antarctic Islands prior to the first confirmed cases.

Fisher's automatic advantage of self-fertilization does not apply in cleistogamous species.

Premise: In hermaphroditic plants, the evolution of self-fertilization is driven by two major forces; the cost of outcrossing or Fisher's automatic advantage of selfing and inbreeding depression. Seminal theoretical works have established that an inbreeding depression threshold of 0.5 governs the evolution.

Bottom-up effects drive the dynamic of an Antarctic seabird predator-prey system.

Understanding how populations respond to variability in environmental conditions and interspecific interactions is one of the biggest challenges of population ecology, particularly in the context of global change. Although many studies have investigated population responses to climate change, very few have explicitly integrated interspecific relationships when studying these responses. In this study, we aimed to understand the combined effects of interspecific interactions and environmental conditions on the demographic parameters of a prey-predator system of three sympatric seabird populations breeding in Antarctica: the south polar skua (Catharacta maccormicki) and its two main preys during the breeding season, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) and the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri).

Synchrony in adult survival is remarkably strong among common temperate songbirds across France.

Synchronous variation in demographic parameters across species increases the risk of simultaneous local extinction, which lowers the probability of subsequent recolonization. Synchrony therefore tends to destabilize meta-populations and meta-communities. Quantifying interspecific synchrony in demographic parameters, like abundance, survival, or reproduction, is thus a way to indirectly assess the stability of meta-populations and meta-communities.

The interplay of local adaptation and gene flow may lead to the formation of supergenes.

Supergenes are genetic architectures resulting in the segregation of alternative combinations of alleles underlying complex phenotypes. The co-segregation of alleles at linked loci is often facilitated by polymorphic chromosomal rearrangements suppressing recombination locally. Supergenes are involved in many complex polymorphisms, including sexual, colour or behavioural polymorphisms in numerous plants, fungi, mammals, fish, and insects.

Rapid loss of maternal immunity and increase in environmentally mediated antibody generation in urban gulls.

Monitoring pathogen circulation in wildlife sentinel populations can help to understand and predict the spread of disease at the wildlife-livestock-human interface. Immobile young provide a useful target population for disease surveillance, since they can be easily captured for sampling and their levels of antibodies against infectious agents can provide an index of localized circulation. However, early-life immune responses include both maternally-derived antibodies and antibodies resulting from exposure to pathogens, and disentangling these two processes requires understanding their individual dynamics.

Coarse-resolution burned area datasets severely underestimate fire-related forest loss.

Global coarse-resolution (≥250 m) burned area (BA) products have been used to estimate fire related forest loss, but we hypothesised that a significant part of fire impacts might be undetected because of the underestimation of small fires (<100 ha), especially in the tropics. In this paper, we analysed fire-related forest cover loss in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for 2016 and 2019 based on a BA product generated from Sentinel-2 data (20 m), which was observed to have significantly lower omission errors than the coarse-resolution BA products. Using these higher resolution BA datasets, we found that fires contribute to >46 % of total forest losses over SSA, more than twice the estimates from coarse-resolution BA products.

Ongoing convergent evolution of a selfing syndrome threatens plant-pollinator interactions.

Plant-pollinator interactions evolved early in the angiosperm radiation. Ongoing environmental changes are however leading to pollinator declines that may cause pollen limitation to plants and change the evolutionary pressures shaping plant mating systems. We used resurrection ecology methodology to contrast ancestors and contemporary descendants in four natural populations of the field pansy (Viola arvensis) in the Paris region (France), a depauperate pollinator environment.

Ozone exposure induces metabolic stress and olfactory memory disturbance in honey bees.

Human activities, urbanization, and industrialization contribute to pollution that affects climate and air quality. A main atmospheric pollutant, the tropospheric ozone (O), can damage living organisms by generating oxidative radicals, causing respiratory problems in humans and reducing yields and growth in plants. Exposure to high concentrations of O can result in oxidative stress in plants and animals, eventually leading to substantial ecological consequences.

Transient eco-evolutionary dynamics early in a phage epidemic have strong and lasting impact on the long-term evolution of bacterial defences.

Organisms have evolved a range of constitutive (always active) and inducible (elicited by parasites) defence mechanisms, but we have limited understanding of what drives the evolution of these orthogonal defence strategies. Bacteria and their phages offer a tractable system to study this: Bacteria can acquire constitutive resistance by mutation of the phage receptor (surface mutation, sm) or induced resistance through their CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune system. Using a combination of theory and experiments, we demonstrate that the mechanism that establishes first has a strong advantage because it weakens selection for the alternative resistance mechanism.

Geographical patterns and determinants in plant reproductive phenology duration.

Biodiversity is and always has been an important issue in ecological research. Biodiversity can reflect niche partitioning among species at several spatial and temporal scales and is generally highest in the tropics. One theory to explain it is that low-latitude tropical ecosystems are dominated by species that are generally only distributed over a narrow area.

Bottlenecks can constrain and channel evolutionary paths.

Population bottlenecks are commonplace in experimental evolution, specifically in serial passaging experiments where microbial populations alternate between growth and dilution. Natural populations also experience such fluctuations caused by seasonality, resource limitation, or host-to-host transmission for pathogens. Yet, how unlimited growth with periodic bottlenecks influence the adaptation of populations is not fully understood.

Tradeoff breaking as a model of evolutionary transitions in individuality and limits of the fitness-decoupling metaphor.

Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) involve the formation of Darwinian collectives from Darwinian particles. The transition from cells to multicellular life is a prime example. During an ETI, collectives become units of selection in their own right.

Mercury contamination and potential health risks to Arctic seabirds and shorebirds.

Since the last Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) effort to review biological effects of mercury (Hg) on Arctic biota in 2011 and 2018, there has been a considerable number of new Arctic bird studies. This review article provides contemporary Hg exposure and potential health risk for 36 Arctic seabird and shorebird species, representing a larger portion of the Arctic than during previous AMAP assessments now also including parts of the Russian Arctic. To assess risk to birds, we used Hg toxicity benchmarks established for blood and converted to egg, liver, and feather tissues.

Integrating laboratory experiments and biogeographic modelling approaches to understand sensitivity to ocean warming in rare and common marine annelids.

Among ectotherms, rare species are expected to have a narrower thermal niche breadth and reduced acclimation capacity and thus be more vulnerable to global warming than their common relatives. To assess these hypotheses, we experimentally quantified the thermal sensitivity of seven common, uncommon, and rare species of temperate marine annelids of the genus Ophryotrocha to assess their vulnerability to ocean warming. We measured the upper and lower limits of physiological thermal tolerance, survival, and reproductive performance of each species along a temperature gradient (18, 24, and 30 °C).

Enhanced spring warming in a Mediterranean mountain by atmospheric circulation.

We analyzed trends of air temperature across the Cévennes National Park in Southern France, a mid-altitude coastal mountain experiencing a rapid spread of forests at the expense of rangelands and submitted to Mediterranean Sea influences and so, impacted by local and regional processes of climate change. Since 1980, April to June warming trend reached a maximum temperature increase of + 0.124 °C year and uniform whatever the altitude.

Limits to reproduction and seed size-number trade-offs that shape forest dominance and future recovery.

The relationships that control seed production in trees are fundamental to understanding the evolution of forest species and their capacity to recover from increasing losses to drought, fire, and harvest. A synthesis of fecundity data from 714 species worldwide allowed us to examine hypotheses that are central to quantifying reproduction, a foundation for assessing fitness in forest trees. Four major findings emerged.

Even low light pollution levels affect the spatial distribution and timing of activity of a "light tolerant" bat species.

By disrupting nocturnal landscapes worldwide, light pollution caused by Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) is recognized as a major threat to biodiversity. As even low light intensities might affect some taxa, concerns are arising about biological responses to widespread low light levels. We used data from a French citizen science bat monitoring program (1894 full-nights monitored on 1055 sites) to explore the landscape-scale effects of light on an open-space-foraging bat species, the Serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus).