Urban landscapes increase dispersal, gene flow, and pathogen transmission potential in banded mongoose () in northern Botswana.

Disease transmission can be strongly influenced by the manner in which conspecifics are connected across a landscape and the effects of land use upon these dynamics. In northern Botswana, the territorial and group-living banded mongoose () lives across urban and natural landscapes and is infected with a novel complex pathogen, . Using microsatellite markers amplified from DNA derived from banded mongoose fecal and tissue samples ( = 168), we evaluated population genetic structure, individual dispersal, and gene flow for 12 troops.

Effect of gut microbiota on α-amanitin tolerance in .

The bacterial gut microbiota of many animals is known to be important for many physiological functions including detoxification. The selective pressures imposed on insects by exposure to toxins may also be selective pressures on their symbiotic bacteria, who thus may contribute to the mechanism of toxin tolerance for the insect. Amatoxins are a class of cyclopeptide mushroom toxins that primarily act by binding to RNA polymerase II and inhibiting transcription.

Exhaustive extraction of cyclopeptides from : Guidelines for working with complex mixtures of secondary metabolites.

Understanding plant-insect interactions is an active area of research in both ecology and evolution. Much attention has been focused on the impact of secondary metabolites in the host plant or fungi on these interactions. Plants and fungi contain a variety of biologically active compounds, and the secondary metabolite profile can vary significantly between individual samples.

Shifts in frog size and phenology: Testing predictions of climate change on a widespread anuran using data from prior to rapid climate warming.

Changes in body size and breeding phenology have been identified as two major ecological consequences of climate change, yet it remains unclear whether climate acts directly or indirectly on these variables. To better understand the relationship between climate and ecological changes, it is necessary to determine environmental predictors of both size and phenology using data from prior to the onset of rapid climate warming, and then to examine spatially explicit changes in climate, size, and phenology, not just general spatial and temporal trends. We used 100 years of natural history collection data for the wood frog, with a range >9 million km, and spatially explicit environmental data to determine the best predictors of size and phenology prior to rapid climate warming (1901-1960).

The changing biodiversity of Alabama : important impacts of seasonal variation, urbanization, and invasive species.

Global warming and anthropogenic disturbances significantly influence the biosphere, tremendously increasing species extinction rates. In Central Alabama, we analyzed Drosophilidae species composition change nearly 100 years after the previous survey. We found ten Drosophilid species that were not reported during the last major biodiversity studies, two of which are invasive pests.