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Understanding how urbanization alters functional interactions among pollinators and plants is critically important given increasing anthropogenic land use and declines in pollinator populations. Pollinators often exhibit short-term specialization and visit plants of the same species during one foraging trip. This facilitates plant receipt of conspecific pollen-pollen on a pollinator that is the same species as the plant on which the pollinator was foraging. Conspecific pollen receipt facilitates plant reproductive success and is thus important to plant and pollinator persistence. We investigated how urbanization affects short-term specialization of insect pollinators by examining pollen loads on insects' bodies and identifying the number and species of pollen grains on insects caught in urban habitat fragments and natural areas. We assessed possible drivers of differences between urban and natural areas, including frequency dependence in foraging, species richness and diversity of the plant and pollinator communities, floral abundance, and the presence of invasive plant species. Pollinators were more specialized in urban fragments than in natural areas, despite no differences in the species richness of plant communities across site types. These differences were likely driven by higher specialization of common pollinators, which were more abundant in urban sites. In addition, pollinators preferred to forage on invasive plants at urban sites and native plants at natural sites. Selleck HDAC inhibitor Our findings reveal indirect effects of urbanization on pollinator fidelity to individual plant species and have implications for the maintenance of plant species diversity in small habitat fragments. Higher preference of pollinators for invasive plants at urban sites suggests that native species may receive fewer visits by pollinators. Therefore, native plant species diversity may decline in urban sites without continued augmentation of urban flora or removal of invasive species.Investigating whether mating patterns are biased in relation to kinship in isolated populations can provide a better understanding of the occurrence of inbreeding avoidance mechanisms in wild populations. Here, we report on the genetic relatedness (r) among breeding pairs in a relict population of Thorn-tailed Rayadito (Aphrastura spinicauda) in north-central Chile that has experienced a long-term history of isolation. We used simulations based on 8 years of data to assess whether mating is random with respect to relatedness. We found that mean and median population values of pair relatedness tended to be lower than randomly generated values, suggesting that mating is not random with respect to kinship. We hypothesize that female-biased dispersal is the main mechanism reducing the likelihood of mating among kin, and that the proportion of related pairs (i.e., r > 0.125) in the study population (25%) would presumably be higher in the absence of sex-biased dispersal. The occurrence of other mechanisms such as extra-pair copulations, delayed breeding, and active inbreeding avoidance through kin discrimination cannot be dismissed and require further study.It has been suggested that a trade-off between cognitive capacity and developmental costs may drive brain size and morphology across fish species, but this pattern is less well explored at the intraspecific level. Physical habitat complexity has been proposed as a key selection pressure on cognitive capacity that shapes brain morphology of fishes. In this study, we compared brain morphology of brown trout, Salmo trutta, from stream, lake, and hatchery environments, which generally differ in physical complexity ranging from low habitat complexity in the hatchery to high habitat complexity in streams and intermediate complexity in lakes. We found that brain size, and the size of optic tectum and telencephalon differed across the three habitats, both being largest in lake fish with a tendency to be smaller in the stream compared to hatchery fish. Therefore, our findings do not support the hypothesis that in brown trout the volume of brain and its regions important for navigation and decision-making increases in physically complex habitats. We suggest that the observed differences in brain size might be associated with diet quality and habitat-specific behavioral adaptations rather than physical habitat complexity.Recent studies have revealed that some bacteria can inhabit plant seeds, and they are likely founders of the bacterial community in the rhizosphere of or inside plants at the early developmental stage. Given that the seedling establishment is a critical fitness component of weedy plant species, the effects of seed endophytic bacteria (SEB) on the seedling performance are of particular interest in weed ecology. Here, we characterized the SEB in natural populations of Capsella bursa-pastoris, a model species of weed ecology. The composition of endophytic bacterial community was evaluated using deep sequencing of a 16S rDNA gene fragment. Additionally, we isolated bacterial strains from seeds and examined their plant growth-promoting traits. Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Alpha-, and Gammaproteobacteria were major bacterial phyla inside seeds. C. bursa-pastoris natural populations exhibited variable seed microbiome such that the proportion of Actinobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria differed among populations, and 60 out of 82 OTUs occurred only in a single population. Thirteen cultivable bacterial species in six genera (Bacillus, Rhodococcus, Streptomyces, Staphylococcus, Paenibacillus, Pseudomonas) were isolated, and none of them except Staphylococcus haemolyticus were previously reported as seed endophytes. Eight isolates exhibited plant growth-promoting traits like phosphate solubilization activity, indole-3-acetic acid, or siderophore production. Despite the differences in the bacterial communities among plant populations, at least one isolated strain from each population stimulated shoot growth of either C. bursa-pastoris or its close relative A. thaliana when grown with plants in the same media. These results suggest that a weedy plant species, C. bursa-pastoris, contains bacterial endophytes inside their seeds, stimulating seedling growth and thereby potentially affecting seedling establishment.Ecosystems are complex structures with interacting abiotic and biotic processes evolving with ongoing succession. However, limited knowledge exists on the very initial phase of ecosystem development and colonization. Here, we report results of a comprehensive ecosystem development monitoring for twelve floodplain pond mesocosms (FPM; 23.5 m × 7.5 m × 1.5 m each) located in south-western Germany. In total, 20 abiotic and biotic parameters, including structural and functional variables, were monitored for 21 months after establishment of the FPMs. The results showed evolving ecosystem development and primary succession in all FPMs, with fluctuating abiotic conditions over time. Principal component analyses and redundancy analyses revealed season and succession time (i.e., time since ecosystem establishment) to be significant drivers of changes in environmental conditions. Initial colonization of both aquatic (i.e., water bodies) and terrestrial (i.e., riparian land areas) parts of the pond ecosystems occurred within the first month, with subsequent season-specific increases in richness and abundance for aquatic and terrestrial taxa over the entire study period. Abiotic environmental conditions and aquatic and terrestrial communities showed increasing interpond variations over time, that is, increasing heterogeneity among the FPMs due to natural environmental divergence. However, both functional variables assessed (i.e., aquatic and terrestrial litter decomposition) showed opposite patterns as litter decomposition rates slightly decreased over time and interpond differences converged with successional ecosystem developments. Overall, our results provide rare insights into the abiotic and biotic conditions and processes during the initial stages of freshwater ecosystem formation, as well as into structural and functional developments of the aquatic and terrestrial environment of newly established pond ecosystems.Identifying and quantifying crop stressors interactions in agroecosystems is necessary to guide sustainable crop management strategies. Over the last 50 years, faba bean cropping area has been declining, partly due to yield instabilities associated with uneven insect pollination and herbivory. Yet, the effect of interactions between pollinators and a key pest, the broad bean beetle Bruchus rufimanus (florivorous and seed predating herbivore) on faba bean yield has not been investigated. Using a factorial cage experiment in the field, we investigated how interactions between two hypothesized stressors, lack of insect pollination by bumblebees and herbivory by the broad bean beetle, affect faba bean yield. Lack of bumblebee pollination reduced bean weight per plant by 15%. Effects of the broad bean beetle differed between the individual plant and the plant-stand level (i.e., when averaging individual plant level responses at the cage level), likely due to high variation in the level of herbivory among individual plants. At the individual plant level, herbivory increased several yield components but only in the absence of pollinators, possibly due to plant overcompensation and/or pollination by the broad bean beetle. At the plant-stand level, we found no effect of the broad bean beetle on yield. However, there was a tendency for heavier individual bean weight with bumblebee pollination, but only in the absence of broad bean beetle herbivory, possibly due to a negative effect of the broad bean beetle on the proportion of legitimate flower visits by bumblebees. This is the first experimental evidence of interactive effects between bumblebees and the broad bean beetle on faba bean yield. Our preliminary findings of negative and indirect associations between the broad bean beetle and individual bean weight call for a better acknowledgment of these interactions in the field in order to understand drivers of crop yield variability in faba bean.Bowhead whales occur in the Arctic year-round. Their movements are largely correlated with seasonal expansions and reductions of sea ice, but a few recent extralimital sightings have occurred in the eastern and western North Atlantic and one was also documented in the western North Pacific over 50 years ago. Here we present details of a juvenile bowhead whale that was photographed and filmed from above and below the water while it was skim-feeding in Caamaño Sound, BC, Canada on May 31, 2016. This sighting occurred over 2000 km southeast from the nearest known range for this species in the Bering Sea at a time that most bowhead whales in that region would have been migrating northeast. This sighting represents the first and only documentation of a bowhead whale in the eastern North Pacific to date.Uptake and use of energy are of key importance for animals living in temperate environments that undergo strong seasonal changes in forage quality and quantity. In ungulates, energy intake strongly affects body mass gain, an important component of individual fitness. Energy allocation among life-history traits can be affected by internal and external factors. Here, we investigate large-scale variation in body growth patterns of Alpine chamois Rupicapra rupicapra rupicapra, in relation to sex, age, temperature, and habitat variations across 31 (sub)populations in the Central European Alps. Taking advantage of an exceptionally large dataset (n = 178,175) of chamois hunted over 27 consecutive years between 1993 and 2019 in mountain ranges with different proportions of forest cover, we found that (i) patterns of body mass growth differ between mountain ranges, with lower body mass but faster mass growth with increasing proportion of forest cover and that (ii) the effect of spring and summer temperatures on changes in body growth patterns are larger in mountain ranges with lower forest cover compared to mountain ranges with higher forest cover.
My Website: https://www.selleckchem.com/HDAC.html
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