Journal of Animal Ecology最新文献

Research Highlight: Myers, J. H., & Cory, J. S. (2025). Long-term population dynamics of western tent caterpillars: History, trends and causes of cycles. Journal of Animal Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70104. For centuries, population cycles have intrigued ecologists and posed challenges for resource managers. These dramatic fluctuations are influenced by strong interactions with natural enemies and/or the climate, yet these external drivers alone are typically insufficient to explain the observed cycles. Cyclic changes in life-history traits (e.g. fecundity) often play a significant role, though the mechanisms underlying these regular phenotypic shifts remain largely undetermined. Here Myers and Cory (2025) convincingly demonstrate the key role of plastic changes in fecundity in driving the 8–11-year population cycles of the western tent caterpillar Malacosoma californicum pluviale. These cycles are partially driven by lethal infections from a specialized baculovirus Malacosoma pluviale nucleopolyhedrovirus. Although tent caterpillars evolve increased resistance to the virus following peak infection periods, this resistance does not incur a fecundity cost, suggesting that eco-evolutionary feedback does not regulate this cycle. Instead, sublethal viral infections induce plastic reductions in fecundity. Declines in food quantity and quality following peak defoliation periods likely further contribute to these plastic changes. While climate variation does influence population growth, future climate change is unlikely to disrupt these cycles. Taken together, this long-term research underscores the importance of phenotypic plasticity in shaping dramatic herbivore population cycles. Future research on eco-evolutionary dynamics should consider, more even-handedly, alternative mechanisms by which the environment can feedback to cause phenotypic change.

Exposure to stressors and associated hormones during development can significantly affect offspring phenotype, including social and philopatric behaviour, but these effects can be mediated by the postnatal social environment ('social buffering'). While the effects of social buffering are well established for complex social behaviours-such as parental provisioning, grooming or cooperative care-the role of social buffering for simpler social interactions-such as parental tolerance of offspring-remains less understood. Here we used the facultatively social viviparous lizard, Liopholis whitii, to test the following: (i) the effects of elevated maternal glucocorticoid levels during gestation on offspring mass, growth, dispersal and social interactions after birth; and (ii) whether these effects are mediated by postnatal mother-offspring association. We conducted a factorial experiment in which pregnant lizards were given thrice-weekly doses of a glucocorticoid hormone (corticosterone) or a control during gestation. Their offspring were then raised either alone or with their mother for 3 weeks. We subsequently released mothers and offspring in large semi-natural enclosures and quantified offspring mass and social/exploratory behaviour. There were persistent negative effects of prenatal glucocorticoid exposure on offspring growth. We also observed lasting effects of prenatal glucocorticoid exposure on social behaviour: offspring from glucocorticoid-treated mothers had stronger social associations with other individuals, including with their mother and siblings, compared to offspring from control mothers. Association with their mother early in life did not mediate the effects of prenatal glucocorticoid exposure on offspring phenotype. These effects demonstrate that maternal stress can be an important mediator of variation in social behaviour in lizards, even overriding the influence of the social environment in the early postnatal period. This has potential implications for understanding how social groups form and are maintained.

Research Highlight: Guilbault, E., Sihvonen, P., Suuronen A., Huikkonen, I.-M., Pöyry, J., Laine, A.-L., Roslin, T., Saastamoinen, M., Vanhatalo, J. (2025). Strong context dependence in the relative importance of climate and habitat on nation-wide macro-moth community changes. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70107. Distributions of species are linked directly to extinction risk. Different threats can drive range contractions and reshape biodiversity patterns, yet their relative importance is rarely apparent. Additionally, the spatial and temporal distributions of species—and the resulting biodiversity patterns—are often incomplete or biased in existing datasets. Guilbault et al. (2025) present a productive framework to analyse biodiversity-monitoring data with spatiotemporal gaps by combining joint species distribution modelling (jSDM) with variance partitioning. Using a Finnish moth monitoring dataset, they demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in identifying the dominant drivers of (and potentially, threats to) species' distributions. Their results reveal how these drivers vary across environments (environmental dependency) and between moths with different functional traits (functional dependency). Expanding this analytical framework to additional datasets with broad spatial and/or temporal coverage will further our understanding of how threats to biodiversity vary across time and space. Advances in modelling methods and the growing availability of high-quality data are substantially improving our capability to pinpoint and address threats to biodiversity—we hope that by leveraging results from such efforts, we may increase capacity for managing these threats to slow biodiversity loss.

Research Highlight: Bralet, T., Aaziz, R., Tornos, J., Gamble, A., Clessin, A., Lejeune, M., Galon, C., Michelet, L., Lesage, C., Jeanniard du Dot, T., Desoubeaux, G., Guyard, M., Delannoy, S., Moutailler, S., Laroucau, K. and Boulinier, T. (2025). High-throughput microfluidic real-time PCR as a promising tool in disease ecology. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70088. Disease ecology aims to understand the causes and consequences of the maintenance and transmission of pathogenic infectious agents. A crucial step in studying disease ecology is identifying the ‘infectiosome’, which I define as all infectious agents circulating among individuals, populations and the community of a given ecosystem. In a recent study, Bralet et al. (2025) propose a new, cheap and adaptable toolkit for determining a targeted ‘infectiosome’, which appears very useful in disease ecology approaches: high-throughput microfluidic real-time PCR (Htrt PCR). This method is a good alternative to costly metagenomic approaches and consists of running several dozen PCRs from a single tissue sample. This technique enables screening, from a single sample, the presence of dozens of targeted infectious agents: the targeted ‘infectiosome’, allowing one to answer several questions. For example, Bralet et al. (2025) applied this method to 274 seabirds and 80 mammals samples collected from the Southern Ocean islands and detected pathogenic infectious agents in new locations. The results also show that some species are potential ‘reservoirs’ of several infectious agents in this ecosystem. This method is really promising and can be easily adapted and used to test different hypotheses in disease ecology at the scales of the population and the community in other ecosystems, such as the urban ecosystem.