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Evolutionary ecology and behaviour

This section considers studies in the areas of evolutionary behaviour and ecology including sexual conflict and selection.

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  1. Understanding genomic and phenotypic diversity among cryptic pest taxa has important implications for the management of pests and diseases. The diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella L., has been intensively studi...

    Authors: Kym D. Perry, Gregory J. Baker, Kevin J. Powis, Joanne K. Kent, Christopher M. Ward and Simon W. Baxter
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:77
  2. If a parasite is able to transmit horizontally or vertically, which transmission mode will it choose? We investigated how the growth conditions and the genotype of the mosquito Aedes aegypti affect the transmissi...

    Authors: Giacomo Zilio, Kevin Thiévent and Jacob C. Koella
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:59
  3. Energy (resources) acquired by animals should be allocated towards competing demands, maintenance, growth, reproduction and fat storage. Reproduction has the second lowest priority in energy allocation and onl...

    Authors: Lin Zhang, Kun Guo, Guang-Zheng Zhang, Long-Hui Lin and Xiang Ji
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:45
  4. Understanding the genetic and environmental mechanisms governing variation in morphology or phenology in wild populations is currently an important challenge. While there is a general consensus that selection ...

    Authors: E. Quéméré, J. M. Gaillard, M. Galan, C. Vanpé, I. David, M. Pellerin, P. Kjellander, A. J. M. Hewison and J. M. Pemberton
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:39
  5. The maternally inherited endosymbiont Wolbachia is widespread in arthropods and nematodes and can play an important role in the ecology and evolution of its host through reproductive manipulation. Here, we survey...

    Authors: Hannes Schuler, Scott P. Egan, Glen R. Hood, Robert W. Busbee, Amanda L. Driscoe and James R. Ott
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:37
  6. Species recognition, i.e., the ability to distinguish conspecifics from heterospecifics, plays an essential role in reproduction. The role of facial cues for species recognition has been investigated in severa...

    Authors: Hanitriniaina Rakotonirina, Peter M. Kappeler and Claudia Fichtel
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:19
  7. The breeding consequences of virus infections have rarely been studied in avian natural breeding populations. In this paper we investigated the links between humoral immunity following a natural flavivirus inf...

    Authors: Tanja M. Strand, Åke Lundkvist, Björn Olsen and Lars Gustafsson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:13
  8. Tracking newly emergent virulent populations in agroecosystems provides an opportunity to increase our understanding of the co-evolution dynamics of pathogens and their hosts. On the one hand host plants exert...

    Authors: Monika Michalecka, Sylwester Masny, Thibault Leroy and Joanna Puławska
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:5
  9. Parental care, while increasing parental fitness through offspring survival, also bears cost to the care-giving parent. Consequentially, trade offs between parental care and other vitally important traits, suc...

    Authors: Isabel S. Keller, Walter Salzburger and Olivia Roth
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:264
  10. Although most extant animals have separate sexes, simultaneous hermaphrodites can be found in lineages throughout the animal kingdom. However, the sexual modes of key ancestral nodes including the last common ...

    Authors: Daniel A. Sasson and Joseph F. Ryan
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:242
  11. The oviparity-viviparity transition is a major evolutionary event, likely altering the reproductive process of the organisms involved. Residual yolk, a portion of yolk remaining unutilized at hatching or birth...

    Authors: Yan-Qing Wu, Yan-Fu Qu, Xue-Ji Wang, Jian-Fang Gao and Xiang Ji
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:235
  12. Diet composition (yeast:carbohydrate ratio) is an important determinant of growth, development, and reproduction. Recent studies have shown that decreased yeast intake elicits numerous transcriptomic changes a...

    Authors: Er-Hu Chen, Qiu-Li Hou, Dan-Dan Wei, Hong-Bo Jiang and Jin-Jun Wang
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:194
  13. The performance and fitness of social societies mainly depends on the efficiency of interactions between reproductive individuals and helpers. Helpers need to react to the group’s requirements and to adjust th...

    Authors: Julia Giehr, Jürgen Heinze and Alexandra Schrempf
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:173
  14. Predation is ubiquitous in nature. One form of predation is cannibalism, which is affected by many factors such as size structure and resource density. However, cannibalism may also be influenced by abiotic fa...

    Authors: Szymon Sniegula, Maria J. Golab and Frank Johansson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:167
  15. Quantifying morphological diversity across taxa can provide valuable insight into evolutionary processes, yet its complexities can make it difficult to identify appropriate units for evaluation. One of the cha...

    Authors: Marta Vidal-García and J. Scott Keogh
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:165
  16. Adaptive plasticity is essential for many species to cope with environmental heterogeneity. In particular, developmental plasticity allows organisms with complex life cycles to adaptively adjust the timing of ...

    Authors: Pablo Burraco, Ana Elisa Valdés, Frank Johansson and Ivan Gomez-Mestre
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:164
  17. Evidence for the transmission of non-genetic information from father to offspring is rapidly accumulating. While the impact of chemical and physical factors such as toxins or diet on the fitness of the parents...

    Authors: Susanne Zajitschek, James E. Herbert-Read, Nasir M. Abbasi, Felix Zajitschek and Simone Immler
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:157
  18. On-going global climate change poses a serious threat for natural populations unless they are able to evolutionarily adapt to changing environmental conditions (e.g. increasing average temperatures, occurrence...

    Authors: Katja Leicht, Katri Seppälä and Otto Seppälä
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:140
  19. The combination of model-based comparative techniques, disparity analyses and ecomorphological correlations constitutes a powerful method to gain insight into the evolutionary mechanisms that shape morphologic...

    Authors: Vicente García-Navas, Víctor Noguerales, Pedro J. Cordero and Joaquín Ortego
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:109
  20. The ability to form a cellular memory and use it for cellular decision-making could help bacteria to cope with recurrent stress conditions. We analyzed whether bacteria would form a cellular memory specificall...

    Authors: Roland Mathis and Martin Ackermann
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:73
  21. The evolution of reproductive isolation between herbivorous insect populations is often initiated by shifts to novel host-plants, a process that underlies some of the best examples of ecological speciation. Ho...

    Authors: Willem J. Augustyn, Bruce Anderson, Jeroen F. van der Merwe and Allan G. Ellis
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:72
  22. Comparative studies suggest that sperm competition exerts stabilizing selection towards an optimal sperm design – e.g., the relative size and covariation of different sperm sections or a quantitative measure o...

    Authors: Alfonso Rojas Mora, Magali Meniri, Sabrina Ciprietti and Fabrice Helfenstein
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:66
  23. Developmental plasticity is thought to have profound macro-evolutionary effects, for example, by increasing the probability of establishment in new environments and subsequent divergence into independently evo...

    Authors: Erik van Bergen, Dave Osbaldeston, Ullasa Kodandaramaiah, Oskar Brattström, Kwaku Aduse-Poku and Paul M. Brakefield
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:59
  24. Phenotypic changes in response to environmental influences can persist from one generation into the next. In many systems parental parasite experience influences offspring immune responses, known as transgener...

    Authors: Anne Beemelmanns and Olivia Roth
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:44
  25. Males and females often have opposing strategies for increasing fitness. Males that out-compete others will acquire more mating opportunities and thus have higher lifetime reproductive success. Females that ma...

    Authors: Trinh T. X. Nguyen and Amanda J. Moehring
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:41
  26. Both natural and sexual selection may drive the evolution of plumage colouration in birds. This can lead to great variation in plumage not only across species, but also between sexes within species. Australasi...

    Authors: Iliana Medina, Kaspar Delhey, Anne Peters, Kristal E. Cain, Michelle L. Hall, Raoul A. Mulder and Naomi E. Langmore
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:35
  27. Many diurnal animals exhibit a mid-day ‘siesta’, generally thought to be an adaptive response aimed at minimizing exposure to heat on warm days, suggesting that in regions with cooler climates mid-day siestas ...

    Authors: Weihuan Cao and Isaac Edery
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:32
  28. Quantifying the conspicuousness of objects against particular backgrounds is key to understanding the evolution and adaptive value of animal coloration, and in designing effective camouflage. Quantifying detec...

    Authors: Jolyon Troscianko, John Skelhorn and Martin Stevens
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:7
  29. Aposematic species advertise their unpalatability using warning signals such as striking coloration. Given that predators need to sample aposematic prey to learn that they are unprofitable, prey with similar w...

    Authors: Mónica Arias, Aimilia Meichanetzoglou, Marianne Elias, Neil Rosser, Donna Lisa de-Silva, Bastien Nay and Violaine Llaurens
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:272
  30. Domestication of Atlantic salmon for commercial aquaculture has resulted in farmed salmon displaying substantially higher growth rates than wild salmon under farming conditions. In contrast, growth differences...

    Authors: Alison Catherine Harvey, Monica Favnebøe Solberg, Eva Troianou, Gary Robert Carvalho, Martin Ian Taylor, Simon Creer, Lise Dyrhovden, Ivar Helge Matre and Kevin Alan Glover
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:264
  31. Genital diversity may arise through sexual conflict over polyandry, where male genital features function to manipulate female mating frequency against her interest. Correlated genital evolution across animal g...

    Authors: Matjaž Kuntner, Ren-Chung Cheng, Simona Kralj-Fišer, Chen-Pan Liao, Jutta M. Schneider and Mark A. Elgar
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:242
  32. Colour and shape polymorphisms are important features of many species and may allow individuals to exploit a wider array of habitats, including through behavioural differences among morphs. In addition, differ...

    Authors: Rafael C. Duarte, Martin Stevens and Augusto A. V. Flores
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:218
  33. The effect of anthropogenic environments on the function of the vertebrate immune system is a problem of general importance. For example, it relates to the increasing rates of immunologically-based disease in ...

    Authors: Pascal I. Hablützel, Martha Brown, Ida M. Friberg and Joseph A. Jackson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:175
  34. In most animal groups, it is unclear how body size variation relates to genital size differences between the sexes. While most morphological features tend to scale with total somatic size, this does not necess...

    Authors: Nik Lupše, Ren-Chung Cheng and Matjaž Kuntner
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:161
  35. Improved performance in a given ecological niche can occur through local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, or a combination of these mechanisms. Evaluating the relative importance of these two mechanisms is n...

    Authors: Martin Laporte, Anne C. Dalziel, Nicolas Martin and Louis Bernatchez
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:160
  36. Living anguilliform eels represent a distinct clade of elongated teleostean fishes inhabiting a wide range of habitats. Locomotion of these fishes is highly influenced by the elongated body shape, the anatomy ...

    Authors: Cathrin Pfaff, Roberto Zorzin and Jürgen Kriwet
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:159
  37. The evolution of primate sexual swellings and their influence on mating strategies have captivated the interest of biologists for over a century. Across the primate order, variability in the timing of ovulatio...

    Authors: Pamela Heidi Douglas, Gottfried Hohmann, Róisín Murtagh, Robyn Thiessen-Bock and Tobias Deschner
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:140
  38. Modern cold-water coral and tropical coral environments harbor a highly diverse and ecologically important macrofauna of crustaceans that face elevated extinction risks due to reef decline. The effect of envir...

    Authors: Adiël A. Klompmaker, Sten L. Jakobsen and Bodil W. Lauridsen
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:132
  39. Aggressive behaviors are an integral part of competitive interactions. There is considerable variation in aggressiveness among individuals both within and among species. Aggressiveness is a quantitative trait ...

    Authors: Urs Kalbitzer, Christian Roos, Gisela H. Kopp, Thomas M. Butynski, Sascha Knauf, Dietmar Zinner and Julia Fischer
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:121
  40. The visual system is important for animals for mate choice, food acquisition, and predator avoidance. Animals possessing a visual system can sense particular wavelengths of light emanating from objects and the...

    Authors: Yusuke Sakai, Hajime Ohtsuki, Satoshi Kasagi, Shoji Kawamura and Masakado Kawata
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:106

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