Dolores Ruiz-Lupión

Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas (EEZA-CSIC) · Departamento de Ecología y Evolución

In cannibalistic species, selection to avoid conspecifics may stem from the need to avoid being eaten or to avoid competition. Individuals may thus use conspecific cues to modulate their behavior to such threats. Yet the nature of variation for such cues remains elusive. Here, we use a half-sib/full-sib design to evaluate the contribution of (indir...

Organisms may respond in different ways to the risk posed by conspecifics, but the cause of such variation remains elusive. Here, we use a half-sib/full-sib design to evaluate the contribution of (indirect) genetic or environmental effects to the behavioral response of the cannibalistic wolf spider Lycosa fasciiventris (Dufour, 1835) towards conspe...

Hundreds of thousands of little creatures live in soils. Some eat live plants, live animals, or both. Others, called decomposers, consume dead plants, and the waste of other living beings (their feces and their dead bodies), and transform them into food for plants. The health of soils depends largely on the presence of decomposers, and thus it is n...

If we are to sustainably provide food to a rapidly growing human population, biological pest control (BPC) should integrate food web theory and evolution. This will account for the impacts of climate warming on the complex community settings of agroecosystems. We review recent studies looking for top-down augmentative pest control being hampered/pr...

The relative body size at which predators are willing to attack prey, a key trait for predator-prey interactions, is usually considered invariant. However, this ratio can vary widely among individuals or populations. Identifying the range and origin of such variation is key to understanding the strength and constraints on selection in both predator...

Aim It is still debated whether allometry, the relationship between body size and body parts, entails merely an evolutionary constraint or can itself evolve. Recently, a hypothesis has been proposed that states that static allometry (allometry measured across individuals at the same developmental stage) can evolve from differences in the developmen...

Soil fauna play a key role in nutrient cycling and decomposition, and in recent years, researchers have become more and more interested in this compartment of terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, soil fauna can act as ecosystem engineers by creating, modifying, and maintaining the habitat for other organisms. Ecologists usually utilize live catches...

A large scale semi-quantitative biodiversity assessment was conducted in white oak woodlands in areas included in the Spanish Network of National Parks, as part of a project aimed at revealing biogeographic patterns and identify biodiversity drivers. The semi-quantitative COBRA sampling protocol was conducted in sixteen 1-ha plots across six nation...

Species assignemnt to biogeographic categories

Pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism (Pre-SC), where females attack and consume courting males, is considered an extreme case of sexual conflict. Different ultimate causes underlying this phenomenon have been proposed for more than a century and still remain unclear. The main objective of this research was to test the ‘adaptive foraging hypothesis’ in...

Theory predicts that a female decision to kill a male will depend on her hunger level and how small is the male relative to her, although evidence remains scarce. Here we experimentally tested if female hunger level and differences in size affect the rate of sexual pre-copulatory cannibalism in Mediterranean tarantulas (Lycosidae).

This work presents a new agent based simulation tool specifically designed to study ecological networks. It includes many unique features like genetics, evolution, space-explicit simulation domain, flexible environmental modeling, etc. Written in C++, it yields a high performance experience and allows extremely large and complex simulations to be r...

One of the current challenges in evolutionary ecology is understanding the long-term persistence of contemporary-evolving predator–prey interactions across space and time. To address this, we developed an extension of a multi-locus, multi-trait ecoevolutionary individual-based model that incorporates several interacting species in explicit landscap...