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One or more embryos? A parasitoidic dilemma....

The small (1.5 mm) parasitoid wasp female in the photo is inserting her ovipositor into the egg of a moth, which she uses as a host for her young. After she has laid her own egg within the host, the growing embryo divides many times to form a clone of genetically...

Editor's choice November

We chose the article of Ellen van Velzen and colleagues as the editor’s choice for November. The authors present a model that challenges the paradigm and common view that plastic inducible defences stabilise predator-prey dynamics. The reason for this contrasting...

Coastal phytoplankton community dynamics, interactions, and coexistence

Diatoms and more generally phytoplankton exhibit a striking diversity of species, which is reflected in a stunning variation of shapes, sizes, and life-histories. Photo credit: Nadine Neaud-Masson - Ifremer Nantes Yet, being primary producers, these small algae ought...

Cover October

The cover of our October Issue is a photograph of an armadillo lizard ( Ouroborus cataphractus ) showing it's heavy armour and defensive tail-biting behaviour. Body armour not only evolved to thwart predators, but also appears to be driven by climate, more specifically...

The price of safety

The world is a dangerous place for a small insect. With so many would-be predators, many insects turn to chemical defences in order to protect themselves. These chemicals range from the toxic to the merely smelly or bad tasting. They all have one purpose however, to...

Which hosts do root hemiparasitic plants chose from a plant community?

As a part of my PhD I wanted to test the quality of 13 different host species for the hemiparasite Rhinanthus alectorolophus, and I planned to include also one host mixture, because this might be the more natural host environment for the parasite. But which mixture...

Towards a common fire strategy scheme for plants and animals

One of the unifying approaches in ecology is to search for common strategies, that is, types of mechanisms and responses to environmental factors and disturbances. Plant strategies to persist in fire-prone ecosystems (and the traits involved) are nowadays quite well...

MOOSE ARE DRIVERS OF CHANGE INFLUENCING ADAJACENT STREAM ECOSYSTEMS

Moose have altered the direction of forest regeneration following spruce budworm outbreak and created vast areas of spruce-moose savannah – particularly in Cape Breton Highlands National Park (see above picture). We conducted a field study to investigate whether the...

How does urbanization affect herbivory?

Urban environments are expanding at a rapid rate with over half of the human population residing now in cities. This fast development promises dramatic changes on physical environment, ecological communities and local and global ecosystems in the coming decades. For...

How robust are the patterns of density-dependence and sex-bias in dispersal?

Organisms disperse from one place to another for a variety of reasons, including search for food or mates and escape from stress. One of the factors that influence dispersal is population density. We investigated three issues on the effects of population density on...

Cover September

The photo on our September cover shows a dung beetle on a boletus mushroom and comes from the paper "Down‐sizing of dung beetle assemblages over the last 53 000 years is consistent with a dominant effect of megafauna losses" by Andreas H. Schweiger and Jens-Christian...

Photosynthetic performance and species success

During ecological successions, the differences in physiological performances of co-occurring species contribute to trigger the changes in plant community composition: however, plant physiology and vegetation dynamics are rarely investigated together. A long term...

When the big partner disappears – ecological consequences of megafauna loss for dung beetles

Dung beetles – tireless workers behind the scenes Dung beetles keep our ecosystems running by processing the left-overs of bigger animals. Services of high ecological and economic importance such as nutrient cycling and soil fertilization, bioturbation and aeration as...

How environmental noise and harvest affect population synchrony....

We show proportional harvesting of species increases the spatial region undergoing simultaneous population depletion on the arrival of an unfavorable random environmental change. This increase in population spatial coherence may have important consequences for...

Can community diversity predict predator abundance?

Riparian habitats, which include streams and the surrounding land, are sites of material and energy exchange between land and water. Predators that use these areas, such as river otter and mink, rely on both systems for cover and prey (i.e., fish, crayfish, muskrat)...

Don't forget the kids - in ecological networks

As every child knows, plants grow from seeds and became adult through their lifetime. But when studying at ecological networks involving plants, we ecologists often look only at adult plants, hence overlooking a fundamental aspect of plants life such as seeds. We...

Cover June

The cover for our June issue shows Grey reef sharks swim along the forereef at Palmyra Atoll. Blacktip reef sharks are rarely seen on these deeper forereef habitats, likely due to competitive interactions between the species. We thank Yannis Papastamatiou for the...

Spatial distribution - phylogeny or environment?

A number of studies has shown the individual influence of dispersal mechanism, species height, sexual system, and wood density on the spatial distribution pattern of tropical tree populations at small spatial scales (i.e. < 50 m). These traits are usually conserved...

Are high-arctic plant-pollinator networks unraveling in a warming climate?

Flung into the high North is the Zackenberg Research Station (see our recent photo story in Biosphere magazine). We may think of the Arctic as a barren place supporting few species, but previous work at Zackenberg has shown that many plants, arthropods, mammals, and...

Individuals differ: does it matter?

Today we are hapy to introduce a new guest post. It's one of our editors, Isabelle Smallegange that has written about her contribution to our Special Issue on Individual Hetergeneity. Link to her blog is here. Individuals, be they plants or animals, are rarely equal...

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