Search results for "evolutionary biology"
showing 10 items of 3886 documents
Description and phylogenetic relationships of a new species of treefrog of theOsteocephalus buckleyispecies group (Anura: Hylidae)
2020
The Osteocephalus buckleyi species group is widely distributed in primary and secondary forests of the Amazon Basin and Guiana Region. Based on integrative analysis, including morphological and genetic data, we estimate the phylogenetic relationships and species boundaries among populations of the Osteocephalus buckleyi group from the Ecuadorian Amazon, focusing on the O. verruciger-O. cannatellai species complex. Our results uncovered the existence of one confirmed candidate species from Sangay National Park and one unconfirmed candidate species. Here, we describe the new species which is morphologically and ecologically distinct from other Osteocephalus species. The new species is unusual…
Taxonomic review of the
2017
Abstract Two new species of the genus Fulvius Stål are described from the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. A taxonomic review of representatives of the F.bifenestratus species group, illustrations of the male genitalia, a color habitus image of each species, and a key to species of the group are provided.
Notes on Shore Flies (Diptera: Ephydridae) from Finland and north-western Russia
2015
The recent checklist of the Ephydridae of Finland by Zatwarnicki and Kahanpää (2014) mentioned 13 ephydrid species as new for Finland without further details. This paper presents detailed records for those species and a few other species of interest. Four species are recorded for the first time from Russia. Trimerina indistincta Krivosheina, 2004 is herein considered as a new junior synonym of Trimerina microchaeta Hendel, 1932, syn. nov.
Evolutionary Dynamics of Pathoadaptation Revealed by Three Independent Acquisitions of the VirB/D4 Type IV Secretion System in Bartonella
2017
The α-proteobacterial genus Bartonella comprises a group of ubiquitous mammalian pathogens that are studied as a model for the evolution of bacterial pathogenesis. Vast abundance of two particular phylogenetic lineages of Bartonella had been linked to enhanced host adaptability enabled by lineage-specific acquisition of a VirB/D4 type IV secretion system (T4SS) and parallel evolution of complex effector repertoires. However, the limited availability of genome sequences from one of those lineages as well as other, remote branches of Bartonella has so far hampered comprehensive understanding of how the VirB/D4 T4SS and its effectors called Beps have shaped Bartonella evolution. Here, we repor…
When earwig mothers do not care to share: Parent–offspring competition and the evolution of family life
2017
Kin competition often reduces – and sometimes entirely negates – the benefits of cooperation among family members. Surprisingly, the impact of kin competition on the fitness effects of family life only received close scrutiny in studies on sibling rivalry, whereas the possibility of parent–offspring competition has attracted much less attention. As a consequence, it remains unclear whether and how parent–offspring competition could have affected the early evolution of parental care and family life. Here, we examined the occurrence and consequences of parent–offspring competition over food access in the European earwig Forficula auricularia, an insect with facultative family life reminiscent…
The effect of inbreeding rate on fitness, inbreeding depression and heterosis over a range of inbreeding coefficients
2014
Understanding the effects of inbreeding and genetic drift within populations and hybridization between genetically differentiated populations is important for many basic and applied questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. The magnitudes and even the directions of these effects can be influenced by various factors, especially by the current and historical population size (i.e. inbreeding rate). Using Drosophila littoralis as a model species, we studied the effect of inbreeding rate over a range of inbreeding levels on (i) mean fitness of a population (relative to that of an outbred control population), (ii) within‐population inbreeding depression (reduction in fitness of offspring fro…
Hard to catch: Experimental evidence supports evasive mimicry
2021
Most research on aposematism has focused on chemically defended prey, but the signalling difficulty of capture remains poorly explored. Similar to classical Batesian and Müllerian mimicry related to distastefulness, such ‘evasive aposematism' may also lead to convergence in warning colours, known as evasive mimicry. A prime candidate group for evasive mimicry areAdelphabutterflies, which are agile insects and show remarkable colour pattern convergence. We tested the ability of naive blue tits to learn to avoid and generalizeAdelphawing patterns associated with the difficulty of capture and compared their response to that of birds that learned to associate the same wing patterns with distast…
Measuring, comparing and interpreting phenotypic selection on floral scent
2022
Natural selection on floral scent composition is a key element of the hypothesis that pollinators and other floral visitors drive scent evolution. The measure of such selection is complicated by the high-dimensional nature of floral scent data and uncertainty about the cognitive processes involved in scent-mediated communication. We use dimension reduction through reduced-rank regression to jointly estimate a scent composite trait under selection and the strength of selection acting on this trait. To assess and compare variation in selection on scent across species, time and space, we reanalyse 22 datasets on six species from four previous studies. The results agreed qualitatively with prev…
Subtropical streams harbour higher genus richness and lower abundance of insects compared to boreal streams, but scale matters
2018
Aim: Biological diversity typically varies between climatically different regions, and regions closer to the equator often support higher numbers of taxa than those closer to the poles. However, these trends have been assessed for a few organism groups, and the existing studies have rarely been based on extensive identical surveys in different climatic regions. Location: We conducted standardized surveys of wadeable streams in a boreal (western Finland) and a subtropical (south-eastern Brazil) region, sampling insects identically from 100 streams in each region and measuring the same environmental variables in both regions. Taxon: Aquatic insects. Methods: Comparisons were made at the scale…
Do allopatric male Calopteryx virgo damselflies learn species recognition?
2012
There is a growing amount of empirical evidence that premating reproductive isolation of two closely related species can be reinforced by natural selection arising from avoidance of maladaptive hybridization. However, as an alternative for this popular reinforcement theory, it has been suggested that learning to prefer conspecifics or to discriminate heterospecifics could cause a similar pattern of reinforced premating isolation, but this possibility is much less studied. Here, we report results of a field experiment in which we examined (i) whether allopatric Calopteryx virgo damselfly males that have not encountered heterospecific females of the congener C. splendens initially show discri…