Diet of Andean Leaf-Eared Mice () Living at Extreme Elevations on Atacama Volcanoes: Insights From Metagenomics, DNA Metabarcoding, and Stable Isotopes.

On the flanks of > 6000 m Andean volcanoes that tower over the Atacama Desert, leaf-eared mice () live at extreme elevations that surpass known vegetation limits. The diet of these mice in these barren, hyperarid environments has been the subject of much speculation. According to the arthropod fallout hypothesis, sustenance is provided by windblown insects that accumulate in snowdrifts ("aolian deposits").

Resource instability undermines predictable plasticity-mediated morphological responses to diet in a postglacial fish.

Phenotypic plasticity has been presented as a potential rapid-response mechanism with which organisms may confront swift environmental change and increasing instability. Among the many difficulties potentially facing freshwater fishes in recently glaciated ecosystems is that of invertebrate prey communities becoming significantly altered in species composition and relative abundance. To test how the rapidity of diet resource change may affect phenotypic responses during development, we subjected juvenile brown trout to pelagic-type or littoral-type diets that alternated either daily, sub-seasonally, or not at all over a single growth season.

Size-dependence of food intake and mortality interact with temperature and seasonality to drive diversity in fish life histories.

Understanding how growth and reproduction will adapt to changing environmental conditions is a fundamental question in evolutionary ecology, but predicting the responses of specific taxa is challenging. Analyses of the physiological effects of climate change upon life history evolution rarely consider alternative hypothesized mechanisms, such as size-dependent foraging and the risk of predation, simultaneously shaping optimal growth patterns. To test for interactions between these mechanisms, we embedded a state-dependent energetic model in an ecosystem size-spectrum to ask whether prey availability (foraging) and risk of predation experienced by individual fish can explain observed diversity in life histories of fishes.

links photoperiodic signaling to seasonal reproduction in Japanese quail.

Annual cycles in daylength provide an initial predictive environmental cue that plants and animals use to time seasonal biology. Seasonal changes in photoperiodic information acts to entrain endogenous programs in physiology to optimize an animal's fitness. Attempts to identify the neural and molecular substrates of photoperiodic time measurement in birds have, to date, focused on blunt changes in light exposure during a restricted period of photoinducibility.

Temporal dynamics of antibody level against Lyme disease bacteria in roe deer: Tale of a sentinel?

Changes in the risk of exposure to infectious disease agents can be tracked through variations in antibody prevalence in vertebrate host populations. However, information on the temporal dynamics of the immune status of individuals is critical. If antibody levels persist a long time after exposure to an infectious agent, they could enable the efficient detection of the past circulation of the agent; if they persist only a short time, they could provide snap shots of recent exposure of sampled hosts.