Cautionary tales on the use of proxies to estimate body size and form of extinct animals.

Body size is of fundamental importance to our understanding of extinct organisms. Physiology, ecology and life history are all strongly influenced by body size and shape, which ultimately determine how a species interacts with its environment. Reconstruction of body size and form in extinct animals provides insight into the dynamics underlying community composition and faunal turnover in past ecosystems and broad macroevolutionary trends.

Photoperiod effects in a freshwater community: Amphibian larvae develop faster and zooplankton abundance increases under an early-season photoperiod.

Organisms that shift their phenologies in response to global warming will experience novel photic environments, as photoperiod (daylength) continues to follow the same annual cycle. How different organisms respond to novel photoperiods could result in phenological mismatches and altered interspecific interactions. We conducted an outdoor mesocosm experiment exposing green frog () larvae, gray treefrog () larvae, phytoplankton, periphyton, and zooplankton to a three-month shift in photoperiod: an early-season photoperiod (simulating April) and a late-season photoperiod (simulating July).

Female lizards () reverse Bergmann's rule across altitude.

The evolution of body size within and among species is predicted to be influenced by multifarious environmental factors. However, the specific drivers of body size variation have remained difficult to understand because of the wide range of proximate factors that covary with ectotherm body sizes across populations with varying local environmental conditions. Here, we used female lizards collected from different populations across their wide range in China, and constructed linear mixed models to assess how climatic conditions and/or available resources at different altitudes shape the geographical patterns of lizard body size across altitude.

Resource competition explains rare cannibalism in the wild in livebearing fishes.

Cannibalism, the act of preying on and consuming a conspecific, is taxonomically widespread, and putatively important in the wild, particularly in teleost fishes. Nonetheless, most studies of cannibalism in fishes have been performed in the laboratory. Here, we test four predictions for the evolution of cannibalism by conducting one of the largest assessments of cannibalism in the wild to date coupled with a mesocosm experiment.

Evidence for the evolution of thermal tolerance, but not desiccation tolerance, in response to hotter, drier city conditions in a cosmopolitan, terrestrial isopod.

Cities are often hotter and drier compared with nearby undeveloped areas, but how organisms respond to these multifarious stressors associated with urban heat islands is largely unknown. Terrestrial isopods are especially susceptible to temperature and aridity stress as they have retained highly permeable gills from their aquatic ancestors. We performed a two temperature common garden experiment with urban and rural populations of the terrestrial isopod, , to uncover evidence for plastic and evolutionary responses to urban heat islands.