Demographic risks from climate change remain poorly understood for megaherbivore species which face unique challenges because their large food requirements impose strong bottom-up limitation while their small surface-area-to-volume ratio limits heat dissipation. Here, we test how megaherbivore mortality is shaped by the concurrent effects of temperature and rainfall along with vegetation productivity, a potentially critical […]

Chronic contaminant exposure may impose hidden physiological costs long before obvious demographic or health effects become detectable in wildlife populations. Epigenetic clocks quantify biological ageing and may provide sensitive biomarkers of cumulative toxicological stress. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent contaminants that bioaccumulate in marine food webs, yet their long-term physiological consequences for wildlife […]

Controlling invasive species is a global conservation priority but is typically resource-limited, necessitating strategies to optimize control. Spatial prioritization methods can improve the efficiency of invader control by quantifying the benefits, costs, and risks of alternative intervention strategies. Yet prioritization designs are sensitive to the distinction between protecting native populations that are currently sympatric with […]

Biting behavior is an important natural defense mechanism in honeybees (Apis mellifera) against Varroa destructor. Significant variation in this behavior exists across genetic lines of honeybees, with certain colonies exhibiting higher mite-biting activity than others. Selective breeding for enhanced biting behavior provides a promising strategy for sustainable mite control and colony resilience. However, successful implementation […]

Deep learning DNA sequence-to-function models offer the promise of gaining mechanistic insights into genome regulation, however their performance is often limited by data scarcity in the species of interest. We present DanioDecima, a zebrafish-specific model leveraging transfer learning from human and mouse-trained models to predict tissue- and cell-type-specific gene expression during zebrafish embryogenesis. Initializing DanioDecima […]

West Nile virus dynamics are shaped by hydrological conditions that influence mosquito habitat and pathogen transmission, but identifying causal relationships is difficult in managed landscapes where irrigation decouples local water conditions from precipitation, complicating climate-disease inference. We address this challenge using a 21-year panel of more than 19 million Culex tarsalis mosquitoes from California’s Central […]

This study presents a mathematical framework for investigating the dynamics of coexistence and competition among heterotrophic microbes across different time scales. Focusing on metabolic interactions, we examine how three strategies: public metabolizing, private metabolizing, and cheating, shape population behaviour. The framework integrates generalized Lotka-Volterra dynamics with evolutionary game theory to capture the effects of resource […]

Background: Anthropogenic noise is an emerging threat to marine ecosystems, yet its effects on marine invertebrates, particularly zooplanktonic species, remain poorly understood. Despite increasing evidence of behavioral and physiological impacts in invertebrates, the effects of noise on embryonic development and the molecular mechanisms underlying acoustic responses remain largely unexplored. Here, to address this gap, we […]

The Intermountain West of the United States has experienced years of extreme drought and increased temperatures. Increasing temperature and droughts can negatively impact native species that are locally adapted to environmental conditions that have persisted prior to the Anthropocene. Bees, especially solitary bees, provide critical ecosystem services because they pollinate ~90% of all flowering plants. […]

We evaluate whether tryptophan (W), widely thought to be the last of the 20 canonical amino acids added to the genetic code, was already present in the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). We reconstruct the evolutionary history of tryptophanyl-tRNA synthetase (WRS), the enzyme that attaches W to its tRNA, and the related tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (YRS). […]

The southern African endemic tree genus Greyia Hook. & Harv. (Francoaceae, Geraniales) comprises three species distinguished by striking variation in trichome morphology and floral architecture, yet the genomic and regulatory basis of these traits has remained largely unexplored. Here, we present chromosome-scale genome assemblies for all recognized Greyia species, namely Greyia radlkoferi, Greyia sutherlandii, and […]

Pathologist-annotated tissue regions provide a fundamental reference for examining spatial omics data, yet such annotations are available for a limited number of samples due to the substantial manual effort required. Moreover, these annotations are derived from morphology within individual histology images, which can overlook molecularly defined regions and obscure intra-sample heterogeneity. To address these limitations, […]