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.

Strategies for reducing per-sample costs in target capture sequencing for phylogenomics and population genomics in plants.

The reduced cost of high-throughput sequencing and the development of gene sets with wide phylogenetic applicability has led to the rise of sequence capture methods as a plausible platform for both phylogenomics and population genomics in plants. An important consideration in large targeted sequencing projects is the per-sample cost, which can be inflated when using off-the-shelf kits or reagents not purchased in bulk. Here, we discuss methods to reduce per-sample costs in high-throughput targeted sequencing projects.

Evolution, not transgenerational plasticity, explains the adaptive divergence of acorn ant thermal tolerance across an urban-rural temperature cline.

Although studies increasingly disentangle phenotypic plasticity from evolutionary responses to environmental change, few test for transgenerational plasticity in this context. Here, we evaluate whether phenotypic divergence of acorn ants in response to urbanization is driven by transgenerational plasticity rather than evolution. F2 generation worker ants (offspring of laboratory-born queens) exhibited similar divergence among urban and rural populations as field-born worker ants, suggesting that evolutionary divergence rather than transgenerational plasticity was primarily responsible for shifts toward higher heat tolerance and diminished cold tolerance in urban acorn ants.

Utilizing herbarium specimens to quantify historical mycorrhizal communities.

Premise Of The Study: Mycorrhiza are critical to ecosystem functioning, but a lack of historical baseline data limits our understanding of the long-term belowground effects of global change. Herbarium specimens may provide this needed insight. However, it is unknown whether DNA of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can be reliably extracted from vascular plant specimen roots.

A roadmap for urban evolutionary ecology.

Urban ecosystems are rapidly expanding throughout the world, but how urban growth affects the evolutionary ecology of species living in urban areas remains largely unknown. Urban ecology has advanced our understanding of how the development of cities and towns change environmental conditions and alter ecological processes and patterns. However, despite decades of research in urban ecology, the extent to which urbanization influences evolutionary and eco-evolutionary change has received little attention.