Adela González Megías

University of Granada | UGR · Faculty of Science

Plants are attacked by multiple herbivores, and depend on a precise regulation of responses to cope with a wide range of antagonists. Simultaneous herbivory can occur in different plant compartments, which may pose a serious threat to plant growth and reproduction. In particular, plants often face co-occurring root and floral herbivory, but few stu...

Many flowers exhibit phenotypic plasticity. By inducing the production of several phenotypes, plasticity may favour the rapid exploration of different regions of the floral morphospace. We investigated how plasticity drives Moricandia arvensis, a species displaying within‐individual floral polyphenism, across the floral morphospace of the entire Br...

Mammals kill both conspecific infants and adults. Whereas infanticide has been profusely studied, the killing of non-infants (adulticide) has seldom attracted the attention of researchers. Mammals kill conspecific adults by at least four, non-exclusive reasons: during intrasexual aggression for mating opportunities, to defend valuable resources, to...

Phenotypic convergence, the independent evolution of similar traits, is ubiquitous in nature, happening at all levels of biological organizations and in most kinds of living beings. Uncovering its mechanisms remains a fundamental goal in biology. Evolutionary theory considers that convergence emerges through independent genetic changes selected ove...

Pre-dispersal seed predation diminishes fitness and population growth rate of many plant species. Therefore, plants have developed multiple strategies to reduce the harmful effects of this type of herbivory. The present study aims to determine the effect of pre-dispersal seed predators (PSPs) on the fitness of a short-lived herb, and to discern the...

Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a genotype of producing different phenotypes when exposed to different environments, may impact ecological interactions. We study here how within-individual plasticity in Moricandia arvensis flowers modifies its pollination niche. During spring, this plant produces large, cross-shaped, UV-reflecting lilac flowe...

Evidence is accumulating of the disruptive effects of climate change on species interactions. However, little is known about how changes in climate patterns, such as temporal shifts in rainfall events, will affect multitrophic interactions. Here, we investigated the effects of changes in rainfall patterns on the interactions between root herbivores...

Dead wood comprises a vast amount of biological legacies that set the scene for ecological regeneration after wildfires, yet its removal is the most frequent management strategy worldwide. Soil-dwelling organisms are conspicuous, and they provide essential ecosystem functions, but their possible affection by different post-fire management strategie...

Herbivorous mammals and insect pre-dispersal seed predators are two types of herbivores that, despite their functional and morphological differences, tend to severely impact many plant species, highly decreasing their seed production and even imperiling the performance of their offspring through transgenerational effects. However, how they influenc...

Experimental Moricandia moricandioides populations. Location map of the twelve experimental populations of Moricandia moricandioides in the study area (Barranco del Espartal, geographical coordinates 37° 31´ 12´´ N 2° 42´ 12´´ W). Blue points denote populations excluded from ungulates, red points denote populations exposed to ungulates. The map com...

Flow diagram of the study. Experimental design and sample sizes in each step of followed procedure: fruit collection, seed trait measurements, seedling emergence determination and field experiments with seedlings. Between-plant level effects refers to differences between (mother) plants, within-plant level effects refers to differences within each...

Model selection at between-plant and within-plant levels. (PDF)

Premise of the Study Polymorphic microsatellite markers were developed to study population structure and mating patterns of the monocarpic herb Moricandia moricandioides (Brassicaceae). Methods and Results Illumina MiSeq sequencing was used to develop a panel of 15 polymorphic microsatellite markers that were tested across 77 individuals from thre...

Background The phylogeny of tribe Brassiceae (Brassicaceae) has not yet been resolved because of its complex evolutionary history. This tribe comprises economically relevant species, including the genus Moricandia DC. This genus is currently distributed in North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Southern Europe, where it is associated with arid...

Sequence alignment for the 24-samples set Sequence alignment, in nexus format, of the 24-samples set, including ITS1, ITS2, ndhF and trnT–trnF regions. It also includes the Moricandia sinaica ITS region.

Supplementary information Supplementary information contains: Table S1: GenBank accessions. Table S2: Comparison between the proposed new species Moricandia rytidocarpoides and Rytidocarpus moricandioides (N. Africa) for several quantitative morphological traits. Table S3: Comparison of the proposed new species Moricandia rytidocarpoides with the m...

Sequence alignment for the GenBank-ITS set Sequence alignment (nexus format) for the ITS regions of the GenBank-ITS set.

The psychological, sociological and evolutionary roots of conspecific violence in humans are still debated, despite attracting the attention of intellectuals for over two millennia. Here we propose a conceptual approach towards understanding these roots based on the assumption that aggression in mammals, including humans, has a significant phylogen...

Mutualistic and antagonistic above-ground and below-ground species have the potential to be involved in strong interactions that can either weaken or strengthen their individual impacts on plants. Their impacts can also have delayed effects on a plant's progeny by altering offspring traits and survival. Few studies have explored the effect of herbi...

Most global-warming models predict an altitudinal movement of plants. This upward migration of lowland species will surely result in contact with related species inhabiting high-mountain ecosystems. We propose that an overlooked consequence of this upland movement is the possibility for interspecific hybridization between narrowly endemic alpine pl...

AimMountain regions are particularly well-suited for investigating the impact of climate change on species ranges because they encompass both upper and lower limits of species distribution. Here, we investigate changes in the elevational distribution of dung beetle species (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) in two separate mountain regions in Europe. Loca...

In the last few decades, mounting evidence points to a negative impact of roads on several groups of animals. Most studies on the effects of roads on animal populations concentrate on vertebrates, and only a few on insects. It is difficult to determine the real effects of roads on insects due to the variety of methods used. We review recent literat...

Individual species respond to climate change by altering their abundance, distribution and phenology. Less is known, however, about how climate change affects multitrophic interactions, and its consequences for food-web dynamics. Here, we investigate the effect of future changes in rainfall patterns on detritivore-plant-herbivore interactions in a...

Integration of spatial and temporal variability remains as a challenge in food web ecology, since trophic links emerge and disappear in time and space and energy flows could change in direction and strength. The dynamic nature of food webs is crucial to understand them in arid Mediterranean ecosystems, characterised by pronounced seasonal changes a...

Beta diversity plays an important role in mediating species diversity and therefore improves our understanding of species-diversity patterns. One principal theoretical framework exists for such patterns, the “habitat-heterogeneity hypothesis (HHH)”, which postulates a positive relationship between species diversity and habitat heterogeneity. Althou...

1. Indirect effects mediated by changes in plant traits are the main mechanism by which above- and below-ground herbivores affect each other and their enemies. Only recently the role of decomposers in the regulation of such plant-based systems has been considered. We hypothesized that: (i) below-ground organisms, both herbivores (negative effect on...

Factors determining the distribution and structure of soil and litter macrofaunal assemblages remain still poorly understood, despite the overriding importance of the spatio-temporal mosaic of biotic and abiotic conditions as main drivers of soil biota and processes. Analysis of the effects of different factors on soil communities have been usually...

The vertical distribution of soil macroarthropods has been poorly studied despite their importance in understanding the interrelationship between the surface litter and deeper soil layers. Analyzing macrofaunal assemblages in litter and mineral soil layers is especially relevant in soils of arid and semiarid areas, where the litter usually forms a...

Spatio-temporal variability is a key factor in conservation, management and restoration of ecosystems. Spatial heterogeneity is caused in many cases by organisms that are able to modify their environments. This is especially relevant in arid systems, where organisms such as shrubs and ants create patches of high nutrient availability (fertile islan...

We investigated the host range and preference of the high-mountain species Timarcha lugens Rosenhauer, an insect species with highly mobile larvae, testing the degree of specialization and the correlation between larval and adult preference for host plant. All 720 larvae, 1,035 adult females and 994 adult males, censused in the field over 3 yr (199...

One of the more common and dramatic patterns observed in species abundance and richness is that imposed by altitude. Many non-exclusive factors have been proposed to explain these altitudinal patterns, including climate, habitat structure, productivity, geographical factors, and historical factors. In this study, we investigated the altitudinal tre...

Abstract 1. A major, and largely unexplored, uncertainty in projecting the impact of climate change on biodiversity is the consequence of altered interspecific interactions, for example between parasitoids and their hosts. The present study investigated parasitism in the Brown Argus butterfly, Aricia agestis; a species that has expanded northward i...

Changes in the abundance and distribution of individual species have been widely documented in Britain and other countries in recent decades, but little has been done to determine changes in community composition over broad geographic areas. Here, we studied species turnover in 51 butterfly assemblages in Britain since 1976, examining extinction an...

Temporal variability is a key factor to understand the structure of belowground communities. Seasonal and annual variations are especially relevant in unpredictable desert ecosystems, where macroinvertebrates are poorly known, despite constituting an important group of soil organisms. In the present study, we analyse the composition and temporal (s...

Many factors, including climate, resource availability, and habitat diversity, have been proposed as determinants of global diversity, but the links among them have rarely been studied. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we investigated direct and indirect effects of climate variables, host-plant richness, and habitat diversity on butterfly...

The assumption that the description of any system depends on spatial and temporal scale has moved researchers to incorporate scale as another factor in determining the mechanisms explaining species diversity and distribution. Although most researchers agree that processes that occur at different spatial and temporal scales affect ecological communi...

Abstract 1. Most plants interact with a diverse suite of herbivores, allowing the opportunity for the existence of positive and negative interactions between highly dissimilar organisms. However, most studies on herbivorous interactions have been performed under the assumption that they occur mainly between similar species. Consequently, ecologists...

Introduction Ecologists have traditionally recognized the consequences that direct interactions between species have on the functioning of ecological communities and on the flow of energy through food webs (Pimm 2002). However, ecological communities are among the most complex natural systems, and thus the interactions between species are far from...

Species-energy theory indicates that recent climate warming should have driven increases in species richness in cool and species-poor parts of the Northern Hemisphere. We confirm that the average species richness of British butterflies has increased since 1970-82, but much more slowly than predicted from changes of climate: on average, only one-thi...

1. Metapopulation dynamics should be more important at the borders of species distributions due to two main factors: (1) populations are less abundant and fluctuate more at the borders than in the centre of their distributions, and (2) resources in the range margins of species distributions are often more scarce and fragmented. 2. Most metapopulati...

The importance of spatial and temporal autocorrelation for the processes occurring at many different scales has been pointed out in the last few years. Although the role of spatial pattern in models on metapopulation dynamics has recently been recognized, there is a lack of empirical studies accounting for the consequences of considering auto- corr...

Summary Brood parasitism is an interaction that negatively affects reproductive success of host species, some of which have evolved defences to reduce offspring mortality caused by the parasites. In this study, we analyse the responses to interspecific brood parasitism of a dung beetle species, Onthophagus merdarius, in which reproductive success i...

This paper examines the effect of ungulates on epigeal arthropod communities in two common plant communities of the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada (southeast Spain). We have compared the abundance, biomass, diversity and specific composition of arthropod communities in grazed and ungrazed plots experimentally excluded from ungulates. In genera...

Over a period of 2 yr, physiological and morphological traits related with nesting in two dominant dung beetle species in the Guadix-Baza Basin (Onitis ion [Ol.] and Onthophagus merdarius Chevr., Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) were analyzed. The role of physiological conditions and resource availability for nesting as factors determining reproductive ou...

1. The effect of the removal of Timarcha lugens (Chrysomelidae), one of the main herbivores of Hormathophylla spinosa (Cruciferae), on the abundance of co-occurring phytophagous insects, the abundance of non-phytophagous arthropods (detritivores, predators, and parasitoids), and the structure and diversity of the entire arthropod community, was stu...

This paper investigates the effect of brood parasitism in a dung beetle assemblage in an arid region of Spain. The study was conducted during the spring season (March-May 1994-1998) using mesh cylinders buried into the ground, filled with sand and with sheep dung on top. We quantified the proportion of nests containing larvae of parasitic beetles a...

We conducted a 3-yr field experiment that manipulated the presence of ungulates (domestic sheep and Spanish ibex Capra pyrenaica, Bovidae) and the monophagous beetle Timarcha lugens (Chrysomelidae) to evaluate (1) the effects on beetle abundance and interaction with the woody crucifer Hormathophylla spinosa; (2) the reciprocal effect of this insect...

We investigated the host range and preference of the high-mountain species Timarcha lugens Rosenhauer, an insect species with highly mobile larvae, testing the degree of specialization and the correlation between larval and adult preference for host plant. All 720 larvae, 1,035 adult females and 994 adult males, censused in the field over 3 yr (199...

Two hundred and two samples of bees from 35 beehives distributed among 12 apiaries were analysed. They were collected between October 1990 and October 1992 in southern Spain. The thoraxes of 25 bees taken from each sample were examined individually (5 050 in total) to look for diptera larvae (myiasis). Twenty-four fly larvae were discovered in the...