Integrative and Comparative Biology最新文献

Co-flowering plant species frequently share pollinators, flower-inhabiting bacteria, and fungi, but whether pollen-associated viruses are shared is unknown. Given that pollen-associated viruses are sexually transmitted diseases, their diversity is expected to increase with pollinator sharing. We conducted a metagenomic study to identify pollen-associated viruses from 18 co-flowering plant species to determine whether (1) life history, floral traits, or pollination generalism were associated with viral richness, and (2) plants shared pollen-associated viruses. We demonstrated that pollination generalism influences pollen-associated virus richness and the extent of pollen virus sharing between plant species. We also revealed that perenniality, multiple flowers, and bilateral floral symmetry were associated with high pollen viral richness locally, confirming and extending patterns observed previously at a continental scale. Our results highlight the importance of plant-pollinator interactions as drivers of plant-viral interaction diversity.

As climate change progresses, it is important to be able to predict how the effects of elevated temperatures are affected by the ability of ectotherms to seek shelter. Many studies on ectotherms have suggested that mobility is a vital characteristic to understand how species will react to warming. Highly mobile ectotherms are not often exposed to thermally stressful conditions because they can actively select temperatures that are thermally beneficial or benign. Slow-moving or sessile ectotherms, however, are not able to change habitats quickly enough to escape from thermal stress or even death. In order to measure how mobility affected how organisms cope with temperature, we quantified the body temperatures, environmental temperatures (using biomimetic models), and thermal limits using respirometry of eight intertidal ectotherms in four mobility classes: fast, intermediate, slow, and sessile. In addition, we also calculated thermal safety margins (TSMs) for each of our species. While we predicted that fast and intermediately mobile species would have lower thermal limits and narrower TSMs than slow and sessile animals, we found that faster organisms had lower thermal limits and narrower thermal safety margins than the other three mobility classes. Our findings indicate that there is an effect of mobility on how organisms cope with temperatures and lay the groundwork for understanding how communities may respond to climate change.

Most-if not all-pollinators make foraging decisions based on learning and memory. In interaction with environmental conditions and competitive pressure, pollinators' cognition shapes their movement patterns, which in turn determine pollen transfers. However, models of animal-mediated pollination often make simplifying assumptions about pollinator movements, notably by not incorporating learning and memory. Better considering cognition as a driver of pollinators' movements may thus provide a powerful mechanistic understanding of pollen dispersal. In this exploratory study, we connect pollinator behavior and plant reproduction by using an agent-based model of bee movements implementing reinforcement learning. Simulations of two bees foraging together in environments containing twenty plants show how learning can improve foraging efficiency as well as plant pollination quality through larger mating distances and smaller self-pollination rates while creating spatially heterogeneous pollen flows. This suggests that pollinators' informed foraging decisions contribute to genetic differentiation between plant subpopulations. We believe this theoretical exploration will pave the way for a more systematic analysis of animal-mediated plant mating patterns, as model predictions can be tested experimentally in real bee-plant systems.

The glucocorticoid mediated stress response plays a major role in coping with both gradual and rapid changes in environmental conditions and may be especially important when conditions depart from expectations. Conceptual models of endocrine flexibility suggest that individual flexibility, measured using reaction norms along an environmental gradient, might predict differences in the ability to cope with challenges. For example, differences in the speed or scope of acute endocrine responses might underpin coping ability. However, empirical results have been limited by the inability to accurately measure individual level endocrine reaction norms. Here, we took advantage of a database of corticosterone measures in 1727 individuals of 99 bird species sampled around the world to extend the concept of endocrine reaction norms to species differences. We first describe a global reaction norm for birds and then demonstrate species-specific differences in reaction norms for baseline corticosterone, maximum corticosterone, and the speed of corticosterone increase to both absolute temperature and to the difference between current and expected temperature. Overall, we found that in addition to changes in absolute corticosterone, the speed of the acute response increased when minimum daily temperature dropped below 0°C-2°C. In contrast, we found little evidence for increases at higher temperatures. We found a similar pattern when temperature was colder than expected given the location and date regardless of absolute temperature, but this effect was only seen for baseline corticosterone. Our models also consistently indicated that species differed in the shape of their corticosterone reaction norm to absolute temperature and temperature deviations. However, we did not have adequate data to fully characterize species-specific reaction norms. We suggest that the endocrine flexibility and reaction norm framework applied in a comparative context could help predict species sensitivity to changing climate, but that additional field data will be needed to fully test this idea.

Climate change is simultaneously increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations ([CO2]) and temperatures. We conducted a multi-factorial growth chamber experiment to examine how these climate change factors interact to influence the expression of ecologically relevant morphological and phenological traits, clines in these traits, and natural selection on these traits using diverse accessions of Boechera stricta (Brassicaceae) sourced from a broad elevational gradient in Colorado, USA. Plastic shifts in a key allocation trait (root mass fraction) in response to temperature accorded with the direction of selection via the probability of flowering, indicating that plasticity in this trait could be adaptive. However, plasticity in a foliar functional trait (leaf dry matter content) in response to temperature and [CO2] did not align with the direction of selection, indicating that plasticity could reduce fitness . For another ecologically important phenotype, selection favored resource acquisitive trait values (higher specific leaf area) under elevated [CO2] and resource conservative trait values (lower specific leaf area) at lower [CO2], despite the lack of plasticity in this trait. This pattern of selection counters published reports that elevated [CO2] induces low specific leaf area but could enable plants to reproduce across a greater period of the growing season under increasingly warm climates. Indeed, warmer temperatures prolonged the duration of flowering. This plasticity is likely adaptive, as selection favored increased flowering duration in the higher temperature treatment level. Thus, climate change could impose novel and unanticipated patterns of natural selection on plant traits, and plasticity in these traits can be a maladaptive response to stress.

Over 97% of ray-finned fish produce free-swimming larvae. With survival rates of less than 0.01% and radically different morphologies from adults, fish larvae play a crucial role in adapting to environmental changes and dispersing fish populations. Despite over a century of research, a critical gap remains in quantifying the energetic strategies of developing fish to determine how species from different thermal environments self-regulate in response to chronic and acute temperature changes and, the energetic costs associated with allostatic adjustments, referred to as allostatic load (RAL). This study examines the metabolic differences in yolk-sac larvae and their capacity to adjust to energetically adjust to chronic and acute temperature change. We studied the yolk-sac stages of two species: (1) zebrafish (Danio rerio, a tropical eurythermal freshwater fish) and (2) Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua, a cold-temperate stenothermal marine fish), under control (C) conditions (28°C for zebrafish and 5°C for Atlantic cod) and compared responses to larvae raised at chronic higher temperatures (31°C for zebrafish and 10°C for Atlantic cod) and exposed to acute temperature change for 1 h in a respirometer (3°C, zebrafish and 5°C, Atlantic cod) during the first week of larval life. Generally, both species exhibited higher metabolic rates and greater energetic-related changes in response to chronic stressors than to acute stressors compared to C conditions. While an acute increase in temperature resulted in some metabolic compensation, acute decrease in temperature led to what appeared to be metabolic dysregulation. Both species demonstrated higher variability in response to acute decreases in temperature compared to other treatments. Overall, the range of metabolic responsiveness was greater in Atlantic cod than in zebrafish, suggesting that stenothermal Atlantic cod have less resilience to changes in temperature than eurythermal zebrafish, at least at the yolk-sac stage and, during the first week of larval life when the yolk limits energy supply.

Network science has had a great impact on ecology by providing tools to characterize the structure of species interactions in communities and evaluate the effect of such network structure on community dynamics. This has been particularly the case for the study of plant-pollinator communities, which has experienced a tremendous growth with the adoption of network analyses. Here, I build on such body of research to evaluate how network structure and adaptive foraging of pollinators affect ecosystem services of plant-pollinator communities. Specifically, I quantify-using model simulations-pollen deposition in networks that exhibit structures like the ones of empirical networks (hereafter empirically connected networks) and those with higher connectance and lower nestedness than empirical networks, for scenarios where pollinators are fixed foragers and scenarios where they are adaptive foragers. I found that empirically connected networks with adaptive foraging exhibit the highest pollen deposition rate. Increased network connectance reduces pollen deposition, as increased number of interactions leads to greater conspecific pollen dilution in the absence of other mechanisms such as pollinator floral constancy. High nestedness in moderately connected networks increases the proportion of pollinators visiting only one or two plant species, which are associated with the highest quality visits. Adaptive foraging allows pollinators to quantitatively specialize on specialist plant species, which increases conspecific pollen deposition. This research advances pollination biology by elucidating how population dynamics, consumer-resource interactions (i.e., pollinators foraging on floral rewards), adaptive foraging, and network structure (i.e., nestedness and connectance) affect pollen deposition in a network context.

Although fishes constitute nearly half of all known vertebrate diversity, their dentitions remain remarkably understudied. This is due in part to the challenges of continual tooth replacement, high variation in tooth form and number along the jaws, and a two-jaw system that allows for prey capture and processing to be decoupled. To help address this gap in our knowledge, we provide a guide to best practices when implementing Orientation Patch Count Rotated (OPCR) to measure tooth surface complexity in fishes using microCT scans. OPCR has been successfully applied across numerous studies of mammal and reptile dentitions but is yet to be applied to fishes. We provide an open-source 3D-OPCR workflow for fish dentitions along with the results from five investigations that illustrate how methodological choices relevant to implementing OPCR in fishes can impact OPCR output. Our goal is to provide comparative biologists with a useful framework that leverages open access software to conduct their own integrative studies on dental complexity in fishes and other vertebrates where whole jaw analyses are useful. We view 3D-OPCR as a powerful but underutilized tool for quantifying patterns of dental variation in fishes that has potential for cross-disciplinary application within the integrative and comparative biology community.

Animal-mediated pollination is one of the most ecologically and economically important mutualisms and serves as a remarkable example of cross-kingdom communication and coevolution. Unfortunately, pollinators, plants, and the interactions between them are threatened in the Anthropocene. While pollination emerges from interactions across biological scales, existing research and expertise have developed in distinct silos reflecting traditional fields of study such as ecology, plant physiology, neuroethology, etc. This forward-looking review and perspective is a culmination of the "Plant-pollinator interactions in the Anthropocene" symposium at the 2025 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, which collected expertise across these disciplinary silos to identify pressing questions our community needs to tackle in the next decade. In this perspective piece, we argue that an integrative, organismally informed systems approach is critical to unraveling the complexity of how plant-pollinator relationships are impacted by dynamic anthropogenic stressors. Specifically, this calls for an intentional and iterative integration of holistic modeling studies with empirical studies. Modeling the emergent properties driven by organismal interactions in pollination systems can identify impactful variables; this in turn should drive design of empirical studies that elucidate how organisms respond to changing environments in the context of those impactful variables, feeding back into improved models. Repetition of this process will allow better predictive power over pollination stability in changing landscapes. Finally, we consider both existing barriers to this integration, as well as emerging opportunities (such as new technologies) that can help bridge across traditional fields.

Understanding the mechanisms that underlie resilience in marine invertebrates is critical as climate change and human impacts transform coastal ecosystems. Metabolic plasticity, or an organism's capacity to modulate energy production, allocation, and use, plays a central role in mediating resilience under environmental stress. While research on marine invertebrate stress responses has grown, integrative studies that examine metabolic plasticity by connecting molecular, physiological, and organismal scales remain limited. In this Perspective, we advocate for the rigorous and thoughtful use of metabolomic and lipidomic approaches to understand resilience in marine systems through the lens of metabolic plasticity. We provide recommendations for experimental design, summarize current methodologies, and provide an overview of commonly used data analysis approaches. Advances in other molecular approaches such as genomics, epigenomics, and transcriptomics can be harnessed to further explore stress responses through multi-omic integrative analyses. As quantitative integrative analysis remains limited in marine fields, we call for a stronger integration of molecular, metabolomic, physiological, and organismal data sets to link mechanisms to phenotypes. We explore the use of these approaches in studies of marine invertebrates and highlight promising areas of multi-omic research that deserve exploration. By embracing metabolic complexity and scaling from molecules to phenotypes, we suggest that the marine invertebrate research community will be better equipped to understand, anticipate, and mitigate the impacts of environmental change on marine ecosystems.