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Publications (275)
Individuals' movements are conditioned by the acquisition of information from personal interactions with the environment or from social sources. Despite the importance of social information in movement decision making, little is known about how individuals proceed when social information comes from multiple sources. Here, we specifically tackled th...
Suitable conditions for species to survive and reproduce constitute their ecological niche, which is built by abiotic conditions and interactions with conspecifics and heterospecifics. Organisms should ideally assess and use information about all these environmental dimensions to adjust their dispersal decisions depending on their own internal cond...
Mounting evidence has shown that personality and behavioral syndromes have a substantial influence on interspecific interactions and individual fitness. However, the stability of covariation among multiple behavioral traits involved in antipredator responses has seldom been tested. Here, we investigate whether sex, gravidity, and parasite infestati...
Nocturnal temperatures are increasing at a pace exceeding diurnal temperatures in most parts of the world. The role of warmer nocturnal temperatures in animal ecology has received scant attention and most studies focus on diurnal or daily descriptors of thermal environments' temporal trends. Yet, available evidence from plant and insect studies sug...
Although animal dispersal is known to play key roles in ecological and evolutionary processes such as colonization, population extinction and local adaptation, little is known about its genetic basis, particularly in vertebrates. Untapping the genetic basis of dispersal should deepen our understanding of how dispersal behaviour evolves, the molecul...
Thermo-hydroregulation strategies involve concurrent changes in functional traits related to energy, water balance and thermoregulation and play a key role in determining life-history traits and population demography of terrestrial ectotherms. Local thermal and hydric conditions should be important drivers of the geographical variation of thermo-hy...
Climate change will continue to increase mean global temperatures with daily minima increasing more than daily maxima temperatures. Altered rainfall patterns due to climate change will also disrupt water availability for terrestrial organisms already facing climatic warming. To explore how organisms may adjust to changes in multiple, concurrent cli...
Male lizards often display multiple pigment‐based and structural colour signals which may reflect various quality traits (e.g. performance, parasitism), with testosterone (T) often mediating these relationships. Furthermore, environmental conditions can explain colour signal variation by affecting processes such as signal efficacy, thermoregulation...
Aging is the price to pay for acquiring and processing energy through cellular activity and life history productivity. Climate warming can exacerbate the inherent pace of aging, as illustrated by a faster erosion of protective telomere DNA sequences. This biomarker integrates individual pace of life and parental effects through the germline, but wh...
Comparative studies of mortality in the wild are necessary to understand the evolution of aging; yet, ectothermic tetrapods are underrepresented in this comparative landscape, despite their suitability for testing evolutionary hypotheses. We present a study of aging rates and longevity across wild tetrapod ectotherms, using data from 107 population...
Age at reproduction can influence the survival and future reproduction of an individual as well as that of their offspring. Remarkably, it has been shown that grandmaternal age at reproduction can also affect the characteristics of grandoffspring in humans and in laboratory or semi‐captive animals. However, currently we do not know whether grandmat...
Climate-modulated parasitism is driven by a range of factors, yet the spatial and temporal variability of this relationship has received scant attention in wild vertebrate hosts. Moreover, most prior studies overlooked the intraspecific differences across host morphotypes, which impedes a full understanding of the climate-parasitism relationship. I...
In the past decades, nocturnal temperatures have been playing a disproportionate role in the global warming of the planet. Yet, they remain a neglected factor in studies assessing the impact of global warming on natural populations.
Here, we question whether an intense augmentation of nocturnal temperatures is beneficial or deleterious to ectotherm...
Behavioral thermoregulation is an efficient mechanism to buffer the physiological effects of climate change. Thermal ecology studies have traditionally tested how thermal constraints shape thermoregulatory behaviors without accounting for the potential major effects of landscape structure and water availability. Thus, we lack a general understandin...
Climate change is generating range shifts in many organisms, notably along the altitudinal gradient. However, moving up in altitude exposes organisms to lower oxygen availability, which may negatively affect development and fitness, especially at high temperatures. To test this possibility in a potentially upward-colonizing species, we artificially...
Climate change is generating range shifts in many organisms, notably along the altitudinal gradient. However, moving up in altitude exposes organisms to lower oxygen availability, which may negatively affect development and fitness, especially at high temperatures. To test this possibility in a potentially upward-colonizing species, we artificially...
Aim: Determining whether altitudinal shifts in species distributions leave molecular footprints on wild populations along their range margins from rear to leading edge.
Location: South-west France.
Methods: We compared the demographic and genetic variation in 42 wild populations of the Western oviparous subclade B2 of a cold adapted lizard (Zooto...
Regulation of body temperature is crucial for optimizing physiological performance in ectotherms but imposes constraints in time and energy. Time and energy spent thermoregulating can be reduced through behavioral (e.g., basking adjustments) or biophysical (e.g., heating rate physiology) means. In a heterogeneous environment, we expect thermoregula...
Climate change is generating range shifts in many organisms, notably along the elevational gradient in mountainous environments. However, moving up in elevation exposes organisms to lower oxygen availability, which may reduce the successful reproduction and development of oviparous organisms. To test this possibility in an upward‐colonizing species...
Dispersal is a central process in ecology and evolution. It strongly influences the dynamics of spatially structured populations and affects evolutionary processes by shaping patterns of gene flow. For these reasons, dispersal has received considerable attention from ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and conservationists. Although it has been st...
Parent-offspring conflicts are widespread in nature given that resources are often limited. Recent evidence has shown that water can trigger such conflict during pregnancy in viviparous squamate species (lizards and snakes) and thus questions the role of water in the evolution of reproductive modes. Here, we examined the impact of water restriction...
In a context of global change, scientists and policy-makers require tools to address the issue of biodiversity loss. Population viability analysis (PVA) has been the main tool to deal with this problem. However, the tools developed during the 90s poorly integrate recent scientific advances in landscape genetics and dispersal. We developed a flexibl...
Understanding how and why individual movement translates into dispersal between populations is a long-term goal in ecology. Movement is broadly defined as ‘any change in the spatial location of an individual’, whereas dispersal is more narrowly defined as a movement that may lead to gene flow. Because the former may create the condition for the lat...
Reproduction involves considerable reorganization in an organism's physiology that incurs potential toxicity for cells (e.g., oxidative stress) and decrease in fitness. This framework has been the cornerstone of the so‐called ‘oxidative cost of reproduction’, a theory that remains controversial and relatively overlooked in non‐model ectotherms.
Her...
Background:
Hosts and their parasites are under reciprocal selection, leading to coevolution. However, parasites depend not only on a host, but also on the host's environment. In addition, a single host species is rarely infested by a single species of parasite and often supports multiple species (i.e., multi-infestation). Although the arms race b...
Understanding how and why individual movement translates into dispersal between populations is a long-term goal in ecology. Movement is broadly defined as “any change in the spatial location of an individual”, whereas dispersal is more narrowly defined as a movement that may lead to gene flow. Because the former may create the condition for the lat...
Understanding how and why individual movement translates into dispersal between populations is a long-term goal in ecology. Movement is broadly defined as “any change in the spatial location of an individual”, whereas dispersal is more narrowly defined as a movement that may lead to gene flow. Because the former may create the condition for the lat...
Kin selection and dispersal play a critical role in the evolution of cooperative breeding systems. Limited dispersal increases relatedness in spatially structured populations (population viscosity), with the result that neighbours tend to be genealogical relatives. Yet the increase in neighbours’ fitness-related performance through altruistic inter...
Abstract The regulation of body temperature (thermoregulation) and of water balance (defined here as hydroregulation) are key processes underlying ecological and evolutionary responses to climate fluctuations in wild animal populations. In terrestrial (or semiterrestrial) ectotherms, thermoregulation and hydroregulation closely interact and combine...
Evolutionary ecology studies have increasingly focused on the impact of intraspecific variability on population processes. However, the role such variation plays in the dynamics of spatially structured populations and how it interacts with environmental changes remains unclear. Here we experimentally quantify the relative importance of intraspecifi...
The sixth BMC Ecology Image Competition received more than 145 photographs from talented ecologists around the world, showcasing the amazing biodiversity, natural beauty and biological interactions found in nature. In this editorial, we showcase the winning images, as selected by our guest judge, Professor Zhigang Jiang from the Institute of Zoolog...
Kin selection and dispersal play a critical role in the evolution of cooperative breeding systems. Limited dispersal dramatically increases relatedness in spatially structured populations (population viscosity), with the result that neighbours tend to be genealogical relatives. Yet the increase in neighbour performance through altruistic interactio...
Dispersal is a central process in ecology and evolution. It strongly influences the dynamics of spatially structured populations, by affecting population growth rate and local colonization-extinction processes. Dispersal can also influence evolutionary processes because it determines rates and patterns of gene flow in spatially structured populatio...
Dispersal is a central process in ecology and evolution. It strongly influences the dynamics of spatially structured populations, by affecting population growth rate and local colonization-extinction processes. Dispersal can also influence evolutionary processes because it determines rates and patterns of gene flow in spatially structured populatio...
Limited dispersal is classically considered as a prerequisite for
ecological specialization to evolve, such that generalists are expected
to show greater dispersal propensity compared with specialists.
However, when individuals choose habitats that maximize their
performance instead of dispersing randomly, theory predicts dispersal
with habitat cho...
Dispersal is a central process in ecology and evolution. At the individual level, the three stages of the dispersal process (i.e. emigration, transience and immigration) are affected by complex interactions between phenotypes and environmental factors. Condition and context‐dependent dispersal have far‐reaching consequences, both for the demography...
Understanding how and why individual movement translates into dispersal between populations is a long-term goal in ecology. Movement is broadly defined as "any change in the spatial location of an individual", whereas dispersal is more narrowly defined as a movement that may lead to gene flow. Because the former may create the condition for the lat...
Climate change should lead to massive loss of biodiversity in most taxa, but the detailed physiological mechanisms underlying population extinction remain largely elusive so far. In vertebrates, baseline levels of hormones such as glucocorticoids ( GC s) may be indicators of population state as their secretion to chronic stress can impair survival...
Identifying the early warning signals of catastrophic extinctions has recently became a central focus for ecologists, but species’ functional responses to environmental changes remain an untapped source for the sharpening of such warning signals. Telomere length (TL) analysis represents a promising molecular tool with which to raise the alarm regar...
Water-conservation strategies are well documented in species living in water-limited
environments, but physiological adaptations to water availability in temperate climate
environments are still relatively overlooked. Yet, temperate species are facing more
frequent and intense droughts as a result of climate change. Here, we examined
variation in f...
Although natural selection is expected to reduce variability, polymorphism is common in nature even under strong selective regimes. Discrete polymorphisms in mating strategies are widespread and offer a good opportunity to understand the genetic processes that allow the maintenance of polymorphism in relatively simple systems. Here we explored the...
Local adaptation is assumed to occur under limited gene flow. However, habitat-matching theory predicts dispersal should favour rather than hinder local adaptation when individuals selectively disperse towards habitats maximizing their performance. We provide experimental evidence that local adaptation to the upper margin of a species' thermal nich...
Understanding how dispersal movements are motivated and executed is the core business of dispersal evolutionary ecology, which is an active research field in environmental sciences. However, recent advances in dispersal research have not yet been confronted to the movement ecology paradigm (MEP) that was introduced to unify the study of all types o...
Dispersal, the behaviour ensuring gene flow, tends to covary with a number of morphological, ecological and behavioural traits. While species-specific dispersal behaviours are the product of each species' unique evolutionary history, there may be distinct interspecific patterns of covariation between dispersal and other traits ('dispersal syndromes...
Enhanced thermal conditions have been credited as a driving force for the evolution of viviparity, particularly in squamate reptiles where it has independently evolved >100 times. However, maternal thermoregulation is a critical component of reproduction in oviparous squamates as well, where considerable embryonic development occurs prior to ovipos...
Due to its impact on local adaptation, population functioning or range shifts, dispersal is considered a central process for population persistence and species evolution. However, measuring dispersal is complicated, which justifies the use of dispersal proxies. Although appealing, and despite its general relationship with dispersal, body size has h...
Sex-biased dispersal, that is, the difference in dispersal between males and females, is thought to be the consequence of any divergent evolutionary responses between sexes. In anisogamous species, asymmetry in parental investment may lead to sexual conflict, which entails male–male competition (for sexual partner access), female–female competition...
BMC Ecology announces the winning entries in its inaugural Ecology Image Competition, open to anyone affiliated with a research institute. The competition, which received more than 200 entries from international researchers at all career levels and a wide variety of scientific disciplines, was looking for striking visual interpretations of ecologic...
Dispersal plays a key role in natural systems by shaping spatial population and evolutionary dynamics. Dispersal has been largely treated as a population process with little attention to individual decisions and the influence of information use on the fitness benefits of dispersal despite clear empirical evidence that dispersal behavior varies amon...
The literature is full of examples of inbreeding avoidance, while recent mathematical models predict that inbreeding tolerance or even inbreeding preference should be expected under several realistic conditions like e.g. polygyny. We investigated male and female mate preferences with respect to relatedness in the fruit fly D. melanogaster. Experime...
Phenotypic coloration in animals is often expected to have a signalling function, but it may also evolve as a correlated trait that reflects life-history strategy, social strategy, or ecological divergence. Wall lizards (Podarcis muralis) exhibit substantial colour variation, with both males and females being red, white, yellow, or a mixture of the...
Semen limitation (lack of semen to fertilize all of a female's eggs) imposes high fitness costs to female partners. Females should therefore avoid mating with semen-limited males. This can be achieved by using public information extracted from watching individual males' previous copulating activities. This adaptive preference should be flexible giv...
Within a population, dispersers are likely to differ in their motivation and adaptations to disperse; yet individual heterogeneity in dispersal decisions is still poorly documented. In the common lizard, females can be classified into 3 types of ventral color (yellow, orange, and mixed) that signal alternative strategies in reproduction and behavio...
1. Understanding the causes and consequences of dispersal remains a central topic in ecology and evolution. However, a mismatch exists between our empirical understanding of the complexity of dispersal and our representation of dispersal in models. While the empirical literature is replete with examples of condition dependence at the emigration, mo...
Background
Movement behaviour can be influenced by a multitude of biotic and abiotic factors. Here, we investigate the speed of movement in relation to environmental and individual phenotypic properties in subadult common lizards (Lacerta vivipara). We aim to disentangle the importance of substrate, cover, humidity, basking opportunity and individu...
Dispersal of organisms generates gene flow between populations. Identifying factors that influence dispersal will help predict how species will cope with rapid environmental change. We developed an innovative infrastructure, the Metatron, composed of 48 interconnected patches, designed for the study of terrestrial organism movement as a model for d...
