Journal of Animal Ecology最新文献

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.

Research Highlight: Chen, J., Wang, M. Q., Luo, A., Zhang, F., Chesters, D., Liu, S., Li, Y., von Oheimb, G., Kunz, M., Zhou, Q. S., Bruelheide, H., Liu, X., Ma, K., Schuldt, A., & Zhu, C. D. (2025). Bottom-up and top-down effects combine to drive predator–prey interactions in a forest biodiversity experiment. Journal of Animal Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70103. Habitat structure influences predator–prey and predator–predator interactions and may interact with predator diversity to determine food-web dynamics. However, only a limited number of studies have investigated how habitat structure and predator diversity jointly shape the predator–prey network. Using molecular analysis of spider gut content, Chen et al. (2025) investigated how various measures of tree diversity and spider phylogenetic diversity shaped the spider–prey network. The spider–prey network was characterized by prey richness, generality, vulnerability and niche overlap in young forest canopies. When considering all spiders together, both tree and spider diversity led to increased prey richness, prey vulnerability and niche overlap, but generality was consistent. However, when spiders were divided into two foraging guilds, web-builders and hunters, the factors driving the food-web structure varied between them. Although both spider diversity and habitat structure affected the spider–prey network, their relative importance differed between the two guilds. For web-builders, phylogenetic diversity was the main driver and high phylogenetic diversity of spiders led to an increase in prey richness, generality, prey vulnerability and niche overlap. For hunting spiders, the tree vertical diversity was an important factor shaping the network structure and higher vertical diversity led to a reduction in prey richness and diet breadth. Overall, the results show that the bottom-up effect of tree diversity and the top-down effect of spider diversity combined to jointly determine the structure of the spider–prey network. However, the impact of tree diversity and phylogenetic diversity of spiders on the structure of the spider–prey network was conditioned by a measure of tree diversity and spider foraging guilds. The results have important implications for forest management, and foresters should aim to maintain heterogeneous forests rather than simple monocultures to enhance predation pressure by spiders on pests and to ensure ecosystem resilience.

Understanding how animals respond to ecological constraints is crucial for interpreting the dynamics of social networks in the wild. We investigated how experimentally induced changes in perceived predation risk and food abundance influence the social behaviour of wild rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis), using experimental manipulations and a meta-analytical framework. We used proximity sensors, trail cameras and observations to record multiple aspects of social interactions. Elevated predation risk caused hyraxes to prioritize spatial adjustments over social rewiring, leading to a slight decrease in sociality and increased social stability within groups. Bachelor males and adult females exhibited greater behavioural adjustments, with solitary individuals interacting more with social groups to mitigate predation risk. In contrast, increased food abundance led to forced proximity at feeding patches, promoting social interactions and clustering within groups. Bachelor males connected social units without increasing network transitivity. Both manipulations highlighted that hyraxes preserve group structure and individual social bonds while exhibiting compensatory social behaviours. Our findings emphasize the possible role of space use in shaping short-term social network dynamics and underscore the stability of animal social structures under mild environmental perturbations. This study also demonstrates the utility of a meta-analytical approach for disentangling context-dependent social responses in complex ecological systems.