Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences最新文献

Male attraction by females through sex pheromones is widespread among Lepidoptera, and antennae are key olfactory organs during male orientation. Broadly speaking, two designs of antennae coexist in Lepidoptera: complex (pectinate) or stick-like (filiform) ones. Pectinate antennae have attracted attention because of their multiscale geometry, assumed to outperform filiform. Yet, the filiform design is by far more common. We compare the olfactory performance of the two designs using modelling, particle image velocimetry on three-dimensional-printed scaled-up models and computational simulations. In terms of absolute odour capture, pectinate antennae perform better at nearly all flying speeds. However, when considering drag, filiform designs are more energy efficient than pectinate ones at low-flight speeds, while the reverse holds at high speeds. This is owing to the differential scaling of drag and molecule capture with flight speed. According to our results, small and slow moths would bear filiform antennae whereas big and fast moths would have pectinate ones, which is the general trend observed in nature. We discuss exceptions to this general pattern and how species could evolve from one design to the other by investigating the influence of the antennal structural elements.

Dynamic transportation networks are embedded in all levels of biological organization. Ever-growing anthropogenic disturbances and an increasingly variable climate highlight the importance of understanding how these networks restructure under environmental perturbations. Polydomous wood ants provide a convenient model system to study the resilience of self-organizing multi-source, multi-sink transportation networks. We used 10 years of longitudinal empirical data on both unperturbed and experimentally manipulated colony networks to develop and validate a comprehensive dynamic simulation model to study network restructuring after resource removal. We performed simulation experiments to study the effects of excluding food sources with varying importance, either temporarily or permanently, imitating pulse and press perturbations of the networks. We found that removing heavily used resources, corresponding to a strong targeted perturbation, persistently decreased network efficiency, unlike random or weak perturbations. We also found that strong perturbations had excessively adverse effects on robustness and function, reducing the networks' ability to withstand potential future perturbations. When transportation networks develop around the efficient use of a few key resources, they may be unable to quickly recover from the loss of these through self-organized restructuring. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the interaction of perturbation strength and network structure in studying transportation network dynamics.

A steady supply of nutritionally adequate pollen from diverse flower sources is crucial for honeybee colonies. However, climate instability, large-scale agriculture and the loss of flower-rich landscapes have made this supply scarce and unpredictable, threatening both apiculture and sustainable crop pollination. We developed a nutritionally complete pollen-replacing diet that supports continuous brood production from May to October in colonies without access to pollen. Omitting isofucosterol, the third most abundant sterol in honeybees, causes significant reductions in brood production and neuromuscular dysfunction in adults, identifying isofucosterol as a critical micronutrient. In contrast, omitting 24-methylene cholesterol-the most abundant honeybee sterol-does not significantly affect brood production, and surprisingly, bees remain viable without it. Colonies fed a commercial diet severely declined in brood production after 36 days and died out. In a season-long experiment investigating the commercial pollination of blueberry and sunflower fields, a treatment group fed the complete diet overcame the detrimental effects of nutritional stress, unlike colonies in 'No Diet' and 'Commercial Diet' groups. This study suggests that feeding a complete, pollen-replacing diet to nutritionally stressed colonies can address the root causes of honeybees' growing nutritional deficiencies, supporting their health and their vital pollination services.

While the subject of much speculation, most quantitative assessments of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific productivity (i) are based on self-reported survey data, (ii) cover only a short period of time, (iii) may be biased by an increase in COVID-19-based research, (iv) cover a limited range of publishers or publishing outlets, and/or (v) cannot distinguish between changes in submission versus acceptance rates. Here we analyse submission and acceptance data from 2012 to 2023 for 25 journals in ecology and evolution, a field that has produced relatively few COVID-19-related articles. We show that although submission rates spiked when the pandemic began, they have been plummeting since. While there is variation in these patterns among countries and journals, the latter is unrelated to journal impact factor. The absence of a coinciding change in acceptance rates suggests that journals have not changed their quality standards to buffer these trends in productivity. Together, this demonstrates dynamic but long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific productivity, suggestive of fundamental changes to scientific practice and communication. A profitable direction for future research would be to build upon our results by targeting topic-, method- and system-related variation in productivity within and across journals.

Basiceros dirt ants are morphologically distinct and widely distributed members of Neotropical communities. These ants possess features that aid in leaf litter camouflage and are larger than other closely related lineages with similar cryptic adaptations. Here, we report the first fossil of this genus group, Basiceros enana sp. nov., from Miocene-aged Dominican amber, which reveals a pattern of body size evolution and disjunct biogeography. The fossil evidences the local extinction of Basiceros in the Caribbean, even as living Basiceros are known from Honduras to Southern Brazil. Using combined morphological and molecular datasets of all closely related lineages, we recover the evolutionary trajectory for body size within the group, demonstrating that body size was initially small in these ants and followed by a rapid expansion of body size in the common ancestor of all living species. Results reflect the capacity for early morphological evolution to influence perceived patterns of body size increase through a mosaic of ancestral legacy and continuous enlargement.

Nectar-feeding insects, birds and mammals develop complex foraging patterns, such as repetitive multi-destination routes known as 'traplines'. While this behaviour likely influences animals' foraging success and plant mating patterns, its drivers and prevalence across species and environments remain poorly understood. Through a systematic literature review, we show that pollinators display varying degrees of movement repetitiveness. Then, using a cognitively realistic agent-based model that we parametrized with data from bee foraging studies, we demonstrate how the interplay between cognition, competition, resource distribution and nectar renewal rate can generate various foraging patterns. Our model predicts greater movement repetitiveness when floral resources are scarce and spread in space, nectar renews quickly and competition is low. These findings challenge assumptions about the prevalence of strict traplining in behavioural studies and random pollinator movements in pollination models. We discuss how a deeper understanding of the diversity of pollinator movements can improve predictions of plant mating patterns to inform precision agriculture and conservation efforts.

Sensory-cognitive functions are intertwined with physiological processes such as the heart beat or respiration. For example, we tend to align our respiratory cycle to expected events or actions. This happens during sports but also in computer-based tasks and systematically structures respiratory phase around relevant events. However, studies also show that trial-by-trial variations in respiratory phase shape brain activity and the speed or accuracy of individual responses. We show that both phenomena-the alignment of respiration to expected events and the explanatory power of the respiratory phase on behaviour-co-exist. In fact, both the average respiratory phase of an individual relative to the experimental trials and trial-to-trial variations in respiratory phase hold significant predictive power on behavioural performance, in particular for reaction times. This co-modulation of respiration and behaviour emerges regardless of whether an individual generally breathes faster or slower and is strongest for the respiratory phase about 2 s prior to participant's responses. The persistence of these effects across 12 datasets with 277 participants performing sensory-cognitive tasks confirms the robustness of these results, and suggests a profound and time-lagged influence of structured respiration on sensory-motor responses.

Seasonal migration has evolved across taxa and encompasses a multitude of features, many of which vary between species, between and within populations, and even within individuals. One feature of migration that appears especially variable within individuals is the route taken to reach a destination, even when the destination itself is not variable at this level. To investigate why, we analysed the geolocator tracks describing 192 post-breeding migratory journeys of 84 common terns (Sterna hirundo), as well as 149 pre-breeding migratory journeys of 75 of these birds. We found little within-individual spatial consistency in migration routes across years, irrespective of season or sex. Instead, individuals departing during the same time window took similar migration routes, which, during pre-breeding migration, when birds predominantly encountered headwinds, were associated with minimized headwind exposure. We therefore suggest that the individual routes of this long-distance migratory seabird can be flexibly adjusted to environmental variation, which is likely to be adaptive.

Predators use prey-emitted cues to assess and localize potential food sources. Sexual advertisement calls offer conspicuous cues for eavesdropping predators. While the ontogeny of predatory behaviour is key for survival and can determine adult responses, our understanding of the development of the responses to prey-emitted cues is limited. Here, we measured the responses of juvenile and adult fringe-lipped bats (Trachops cirrhosus) to the acoustic advertisement calls of co-occurring anurans. We confirmed that adult bats modulate their foraging behaviour based on their prey's acoustic cues associated with prey palatability. The responses of juvenile bats revealed that ontogeny plays an important role in bat predatory responses. In contrast to adults, prey palatability did not predict predatory behaviour in juveniles, which responded strongly to poisonous toads and little to some palatable frog species, suggesting that avoidance of poisonous species is learned through experience. Despite these differences, both juveniles and adults appeared to attend to acoustic cues related to body size. Our results support the hypothesis that, over development, acoustic preferences of eavesdropping predators become more closely aligned with advantageous foraging outcomes. Overall, these results offer the first evidence of developmental changes refining decision-making in an eavesdropping predator in the wild.

The western house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, is a human commensal and an outstanding model organism for studying a wide variety of traits and diseases. However, we have few genomic resources for wild mice and only a rudimentary understanding of the demographic history of house mice in Europe. Here, we sequenced 59 whole genomes of mice collected from England, Scotland, Wales, Guernsey, northern France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. We combined this dataset with 24 previously published sequences from southern France, Germany and Iran and compared patterns of population structure and inferred demographic parameters for house mice in western Europe to patterns seen in humans. Principal component and phylogenetic analyses identified three genetic clusters in western European mice. Admixture and f-branch statistics identified historical gene flow between these genetic clusters. Demographic analyses suggest a shared history of population bottlenecks prior to 20 000 years ago. Estimated divergence times between populations of house mice from western Europe ranged from 1500 to 5500 years ago, in general agreement with the zooarchaeological record. These results correspond well with key aspects of contemporary human population structure and the history of migration in western Europe, highlighting the commensal relationship of this important genetic model.