Daniel Sol

Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications | CREAF

All organisms face a certain risk of dying before reproducing. Given that reproducing earlier can also ensure that offspring start breeding sooner, there is strong pressure on individuals to reproduce as early as possible. Why, then, some organisms mature late, defer reproduction and age slowly? Major evolutionary transitions in life history are be...

Despite vision is an essential sense for many animals, the intuitively appealing notion that the visual system has been shaped by environmental light conditions is backed by insufficient evidence. Based on a comprehensive phylogenetic comparative analysis of birds, we investigate if exposure to different light conditions might have triggered evolut...

Tropical species richness is threatened by habitat degradation associated with land‐use conversion, yet the consequences for functional diversity remain little understood. Progress has been hindered by difficulties in obtaining comprehensive species‐level trait information to characterize entire assemblages and insufficient appreciation that increa...

The rapid conversion of natural habitats to anthropogenic landscapes is threatening insect pollinators worldwide, raising concern regarding the negative consequences on their fundamental role as plant pollinators. However, not all pollinators are negatively affected by habitat conversion, as certain species find appropriate resources in anthropogen...

Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis is a powerful tool for population genetics, pedigree reconstruction and phenotypic trait mapping. However, the untapped potential of SNP markers to discriminate the sex of individuals in species with reduced sexual dimorphism or of individuals during immature stages remains a largely unexplored avenue....

Coevolution played a central role in shaping biodiversity. However, coevolutionary events driving reciprocal diversification between interacting partners lack empirical evidences. Examples of diversification arising from mutualisms and antagonisms at different trophic levels are scarce, which limits our understanding on how complex relationships be...

Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analyses are a powerful tool for population genetics, pedigree reconstruction and phenotypic trait mapping. SNPs could also be useful for sexing individuals in species with reduced sexual dimorphism, yet this possibility remains poorly explored. Here, we develop a novel protocol for molecular sexing of birds bas...

A longstanding issue in biology is whether the intelligence of animals can be predicted by absolute or relative brain size. However, progress has been hampered by an insufficient understanding of how neuron numbers shape internal brain organization and cognitive performance. On the basis of estimations of neuron numbers for 111 bird species, we sho...

Environmental changes caused by human activities are responsible of rapid loss of biodiversity worldwide. The ability of animals to cope with abrupt and rapid changes largely depends on how reproductive decisions impact on demography. Although decisions like where and when to breed, or how much parental investment is provided are major sources of v...

Despite important recent advances in cognitive ecology, our current understanding of avian cognition still largely rests on research conducted on a few model taxa. Vultures are an ecologically distinctive group of species by being the only obligate carrion consumers across terrestrial vertebrates. Their unique scavenging lifestyle suggests they hav...

The processes that allow some lineages to diversify rapidly at a global scale remain poorly understood. Although earlier studies emphasized the importance of dispersal, global expansions expose populations to novel environments and may also require adaptation and diversification across new niches. In this study, we investigated the contributions of...

Biological invasions pose one of the most severe environmental challenges of the twenty‐first century. A longstanding idea is that invasion risk is predictable based on the phylogenetic distance – and hence ecological resemblance – between non‐native and native species. However, current evidence is contradictory. To explain these mixed results, it...

Cities are considered hotspots of biological invasions, yet it remains unclear why non‐indigenous species are so successful in environments that most local native species do not tolerate. Here, we explore the intriguing possibility that humans may be unintentionally introducing species preadapted to persist in such environments. Combining data on h...

Islands have long been recognized as key contributors to biodiversity because they facilitate geographic isolation and ecological divergence from mainland ancestors. However, island colonization has traditionally been considered an evolutionary dead-end process, and its consequences for continental biodiversity remain understudied. Here, we use the...

This handbook lays out the science behind how animals think, remember, create, calculate, and remember. It provides concise overviews on major areas of study such as animal communication and language, memory and recall, social cognition, social learning and teaching, numerical and quantitative abilities, as well as innovation and problem solving. T...

Growing evidence that individuals of many generalist animals behave as resource specialists have attracted substantial research interest for its ecological and evolutionary implications. Variation in resource preferences is considered to be critical for developing a general theory of individual specialization. However, it remains to be shown whethe...

Whether cities are more or less diverse than surrounding environments, and the extent to which non-native species in cities impact regional species pools, remain two fundamental yet unanswered questions in urban ecology. Here we offer a unifying framework for understanding the mechanisms that generate biodiversity patterns across taxonomic groups a...

Cultivated exotic plants are often introduced for their aesthetic value and today comprise a substantial fraction of the flora of urban domestic gardens. Yet, their relative contribution to the functional diversity of domestic gardens and how it changes across different climate zones is insufficiently understood. Here, we investigated whether the e...

When it comes to the brain, bigger is generally considered better in terms of cognitive performance. While this notion is supported by studies of birds and primates showing that larger brains improve learning capacity, similar evidence is surprisingly lacking for invertebrates. Although the brain of invertebrates is smaller and simpler than that of...

Despite biological invasions are one of the main environmental problems of the twenty-first century, there is still no theoretical or empirical agreement on whether a high phylogenetic relatedness between exotic and native species positively or negatively affect invasion success. To resolve this conundrum, it has been proposed that the effect might...

Behavioral innovation and problem solving are widely considered important mechanisms by which animals respond to novel environmental challenges, including those induced by human activities. Despite its functional and ecological relevance, much of our current understanding of these processes comes from studies in vertebrates. Understanding these pro...

Growing evidence that individuals of many generalist animals behave as resource specialists has attracted research interest for its ecological and evolutionary implications. Although variation in resource preferences is critical for developing a general theory of individual specialization, it remains to be shown whether diverging preferences can ar...

Despite their miniature brains, insects exhibit substantial variation in brain size. Although the functional significance of this variation is increasingly recognized, research on whether differences in insect brain sizes are mainly the result of constraints or selective pressures has hardly been performed. Here, we address this gap by combining pr...

Body size evolution is generally framed by the benefits of being large, while costs are largely overlooked. An important putative cost of being large is the need to extend development periods, which should increase exposure to predation and potentially select against larger size. In birds, this selection pressure can be important because predation...

Behavioural plasticity is believed to reduce species vulnerability to extinction, yet global evidence supporting this hypothesis is lacking. We address this gap by quantifying the extent to which birds are observed behaving in novel ways to obtain food in the wild; based on a unique dataset of >3,800 novel behaviours, we show that species with a hi...

Urbanization is one of the most drastic alterations of natural habitats, causing sudden adaptive mismatches that make population persistence difficult for many organisms. Urban contexts may be challenging for adaptation, particularly for animals with long generation times with slow evolutionary responses. This chapter argues that cognition may play...

Parasites can have important detrimental effects on host fitness, thereby influencing their ecology and evolution. Hosts can, in turn, exert strong selective pressures on their parasites, affecting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Although the reciprocal pressures that hosts and parasites exert on each other have long been recognized, the mechanisms are...

Urbanisation is driving rapid declines in species richness and abundance worldwide, but the general implications for ecosystem function and services remain poorly understood. Here, we integrate global data on bird communities with comprehensive information on traits associated with ecological processes to show that assemblages in highly urbanised e...

Urbanization is a major driver of local biodiversity losses, but the traits that determine whether species are able to tolerate urban environments remain poorly understood. Theory suggests that a larger brain should provide higher tolerance to urbanization by enhancing behavioral flexibility to cope with novel challenges. However, assembling empiri...

A large brain is widely considered a distinctive feature of intelligence, a notion that mostly derives from studies in mammals. However, studies in inse cts demonstrates that cognitively sophisticated processes, such as social learning and tool use, are still possible with very small brains . Even after accounting for the allometric effect of body...

Behavioural innovation is widely considered an important mechanism by which animals respond to novel environmental challenges, including those induced by human activities. Despite its functional and ecological relevance, much of our current understanding of the innovation process comes from studies in vertebrates. Understanding innovation processes...

Evidence is accumulating that species traits can spur their evolutionary diversification by influencing niche shifts, range expansions, and extinction risk. Previous work has shown that larger brains (relative to body size) facilitate niche shifts and range expansions by enhancing behavioral plasticity but whether larger brains also promote evoluti...

Understanding what affects population growth in novel environments is fundamental to forecast organisms' responses to global change, including biological invasions and land use intensification. Novel environments are challenging because they can cause maladaptation, increasing the risk of extinction by negative population growth. Animals can avoid...

Soil fauna play a fundamental role on key ecosystem functions like organic matter decomposition, although how local assemblages are responding to climate change and whether these changes may have consequences to ecosystem functioning is less clear. Previous studies have revealed that a continued environmental stress may result in poorer communities...

Surveys of the number of adult gulls in an area of 840 m2 were made over the day from a vantage point. We sampled seven days during the incubation stage and four during the nestling stage within the second fortnight of March and the last week of April, respectively. Counts were catried out every two hours from sunrise (0600) to sunset (20:00). The...

Aim Habitat loss and alteration are widely considered one of the main drivers of current pollinator diversity loss. Yet little is known about habitat importance and preferences for major groups of pollinators, although this information is crucial to anticipate and mitigate the current decline of their populations. We aim to rank and assess the impo...

Synopsis: Although urbanization is a major threat to biodiversity, some species are able to thrive in cities. This might be because they have specific adaptations to urban conditions, because they are able to cope with artificial habitats in general or because they are generalists that can live in a wide range of conditions. We use the latest vers...

Theory and evidence suggest that some selective pressures are more common on islands than in adjacent mainland habitats, leading evolution to follow predictable trends. The existence of predictable evolutionary trends has nonetheless been difficult to demonstrate, mainly because of the challenge of separating in situ evolution from sorting processe...

Despite growing appreciation of the importance of considering a pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) perspective to understand how animals interact with their environment, studies relating behavior to life history under altered environmental conditions are still rare. By means of a comparative analysis of flight initiation distances (i.e., the distance at...

Habitat loss and alteration is widely considered one of the main drivers of the current loss of pollinator diversity. Unfortunately, we still lack a comprehensive analysis of habitat importance, use and preference for major groups of pollinators. Here, we address this gap analysing a large dataset of 15,762 bee specimens (more than 400 species) acr...

In this report, we describe the semisynthesis of two series of ursolic and betulinic acid derivatives through designed by modifications at the C-3 and C-28 positions and demonstrate their antimalarial activity against chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum (W2 strain). Structural modifications at C-3 were more advantageous to antimalarial activity tha...

Host specialization has long been hypothesized to explain the extraordinary diversity of phytophagous insects in the tropics. However, addressing this hypothesis has proved challenging because of the risk of over-looking rare interactions, and hence biasing specialization estimations, and the difficulties to separate the diversity component attribu...

Despite the recognised conservation value of phylogenetic diversity, little is known about how it is affected by the urbanisation process. Combining a complete avian phylogeny with surveys along urbanisation gradients from five continents, we show that highly urbanised environments supported on average 450 million fewer years of evolutionary histor...

Many nonindigenous organisms, including birds, are often restricted to human-altered environments within the region of introduction. The classical explanation is that human-related alterations make the environment easier to invade by reducing biotic resistance and offering new niche opportunities. However, the pattern may also reflect that many mor...

Animal personality has become a major topic in animal behaviour. Much recent progress has come from the use of the open-field test, which is routinely used to separate individuals into fast and slow explorers. However, there is no standard way to conduct the test and it is unclear whether the test really measures exploration. Here, we addressed the...

Environmental variability has long been postulated as a major selective force in the evolution of large brains. However, assembling evidence for this hypothesis has proved difficult. Here, by combining brain size information for over 1,200 bird species with remote-sensing analyses to estimate temporal variation in ecosystem productivity, we show th...

Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References

List of all the species and their associated traits used in the comparative analysis. The excel file contains a sheet with the data and a sheet with a detailed description of each variable in the data. Cells with a "NA" value mean data is not available.

Fundamental to the establishment of exotic species in natural environments is that the invader finds an appropriate niche in the novel environment. However, it is currently unclear whether this is achieved by competitively displacing native species from their niches and/or by exploiting niche opportunities not monopolized by native species. Combini...

Large brains (relative to body size) might confer fitness benefits to animals. Although the putative costs of well-developed brains can constrain the majority of species to modest brain sizes, these costs are still poorly understood. Given that the neural tissue is energetically expensive and demands antioxidants, one potential cost of developing a...

Island colonization is often assumed to trigger extreme levels of phenotypic diversification. Yet, empirical evidence suggests that it does not always so. In this study we test this hypothesis using a completely sampled mainland-island system, the arid clade of Hemidactylus, a group of geckos mainly distributed across Africa, Arabia and the Socotra...

Invasion biology is concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of the human-assisted introduction of organisms outside their native ranges. Ever since Elton published the foundational book “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants” (Elton 1958), the field has gained enormous importance in ecology. A major motivation in developin...

Despite growing interest in the evolution of enlarged brains, the biological significance of brain size variation remains controversial. Much of the controversy is over the extent to which brain structures have evolved independently of each other (mosaic evolution) or in a coordinated way (concerted evolution). If larger brains have evolved by the...

The evolutionary origin of innovativeness remains puzzling because innovating means responding to novel or unusual problems and hence is unlikely to be selected by itself. A plausible alternative is considering innovativeness as a co-opted product of traits that have evolved for other functions yet together predispose individuals to solve problems...

The evolutionary origin of innovative capacities remains contentious. For some authors, innovativeness is an adaptive specialization related to particular modular cognitive processes. However, this hypothesis lacks a plausible evolutionary mechanism. In this chapter, I discuss the alternative that innovativeness is not the direct target of selectio...

The capacity to behave innovatively facilitates adaptation to changing environmental conditions and accelerates speciation rates. Innovation tendencies show substantial variation both among and within species, but the sources of this variation remain poorly understood. There has been much debate on the role of cognition and significant amounts of e...

Urbanization involves dramatic environmental alterations, which can limit survival and reproduction of organisms and contribute to loss of biodiversity. One such alteration is anthropogenic noise, which biases natural ambient noise spectra toward low frequencies where it may interfere with acoustic communication among birds. Because vocalizing at h...

Aim Although biological invasions represent a major cause of biodiversity loss, the actual mechanisms driving species extinctions remain insufficiently understood. Here we investigate the role of three processes as drivers of phylogenetic loss in invaded local plant communities, namely the ‘biotic resistance’, ‘environmental filtering’ and ‘functio...