Jin Yoshimura

Shizuoka University · Department of Mathematical and Systems Engineering

In a national park in Northeast Thailand, agricultural land has been converted from natural forest by small-scale farmers. To investigate the impact of repeated cassava monoculture on soil, we conducted a five-year (2016–2020) study on the physical and chemical properties of soil in cassava farmland and examined the properties of forest soil as a c...

The typical seasonally dry forests in Southeast Asia are the mixed deciduous forest (MDF), dry dipterocarp (deciduous) forest (DDF), and dry evergreen forest (DEF). We obtained 21 physiological traits in the top/sunlit leaves of 107, 65 and 51 tree species in MDF, DEF and DDF, respectively. Approximately 70%, 95% and 95% of canopy tree species whic...

The behavior of amputating the legs of spider prey by Cyphononyx fulvognathus (Pepsini, Pepsinae, Pompilidae) is reported for the first time. The prey was a female of Heteropoda, presumably H. venatoria (Araneae: Sparassidae), which is also the first prey record of Heteropoda for this wasp species. The present observation was found to be one of the...

The emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) caused by the excess use of antimicrobials has come to be recognized as a global threat to public health. There is a ‘tragedy of the commons’ type social dilemma behind this excess use of antimicrobials, which should be recognized by all stakeholders. To address this global threat, we thus surveyed ei...

The trade-off between short-term success and long-term sustainability is a common subject of great importance both in biological evolution of organisms and in economic activities of human beings. In evolutionary biology, bet-hedging theories have described it as the trade-off between the (within-generation) arithmetic mean fitness and the (between-...

This study presents a long-term alternative formula for stock price variation described by a geometric Brownian motion on the basis of median instead of mean or expected values. The proposed method is motivated by the observation made in remote fields, where optimalizty of bet-hedging or diversification strategies is explained based on a measure di...

The use of plastic film imposes various environmental risks in agroecosystems. The replacement of plastics with organic materials for mulching has been suggested to enhance the sustainability of agroecosystems. However, whether woodchip mulch can be used for annual crops needs to be verified. We examined the effects of mulberry woodchip mulches on...

Power-law distributions are observed to describe many physical phenomena with remarkable accuracy. In some cases, the distribution gives no indication of a cutoff in the tail, which poses interesting theoretical problems, because its average is then infinite. It is also known that the averages of samples of such data do not approach a normal distri...

The study of cooperation has been extensively studied in game theory. Especially, two-player two-strategy games have been categorized according to their equilibrium strategies and fully analysed. Recently, a grand unified game covering all types of two-player two-strategy games, i.e., the weightlifting game, was proposed. In the present study, we e...

The plastics have recently been recognized as serious global environmental hazards, because they do not decay in nature. The use of plastic film for mulching imposes various environmental risks in agroecosystems. The replacement of plastics with organic materials for mulching has been suggested to enhance the sustainability of agroecosystems. Howev...

Temporal variations in population size under unpredictable environments are of primary concern in evolutionary ecology, where time scale enters as an important factor while setting up an optimization problem. Thus, short-term optimization with traditional (arithmetic) mean fitness may give a different result from long-term optimization. In the long...

The new genus Erythropompilus Shimizu & Pitts, gen. nov. from the Oriental Region (Pompilidae, Pompilinae) is described, based on the new species E. malaysiensis Pitts & Shimizu, sp. nov. from Malaysia. Two other new species of this genus, E. thailandensis Pitts & Shimizu, sp. nov. from Thailand and E. taiwanensis Pitts & Shimizu, sp. nov. from Tai...

While life history, physiology and molecular phylogeny in plants have been widely studied, understanding how physiology changes with the evolution of life history change remains largely unknown. In two closely related understory Strobilanthes plants, the molecular phylogeny has previously shown that the monocarpic 6-year masting S. flexicaulis have...

The development of cooperation in human societies is a major unsolved problem in biological and social sciences. Extensive studies in game theory have shown that cooperative behaviour can evolve only under very limited conditions or with additional complexities, such as spatial structure. Non-trivial two-person games are categorized into three type...

Males usually compete to gain access to prospective mates. Through this male–male competition, superior males have a higher chance of passing on their traits to the next generation of male offspring. One category of male traits is armaments, which are weapons used during competition, for example, the chelae of fiddler crabs and the antlers of deer....

The origin of eusociality, altruistically foregoing personal reproduction to help others, has been a long-standing paradox ever since Darwin. Most eusocial insects and rodents likely evolved from subsocial precursors, in which older offspring "helpers" contribute to the development of younger siblings without a permanent sterile caste. The driving...

We treat the Australian spider wasp ‘Ctenocerini’, revising the systematics of Maurillus Smith, adding a new species Maurillus argenticapitis Pitts & Shimizu, sp. nov. and describing two new monobasic genera Maurilloides Pitts & Shimizu, gen. nov. based on Maurilloides nigrisoma Pitts & Shimizu, sp. nov. and Evansiclavelia Pitts, Rodriguez & Shimiz...

While life history, physiology and molecular phylogeny in plants have been widely studied, understanding how physiology changes with the evolutionally life historical change remains largely unknown. In two closely related understory Strobilanthes plants, the molecular phylogeny has previously shown that the monocarpic 6-year masting S. flexicaulis...

Periodical cicadas are the only confirmed periodical animals with long life cycles. In Japan, however, 8-year periodicity had been suggested in a species of train millipedes that had frequently obstructed trains in the central mountainous region of Honshu, Japan. This species was identified as Parafontaria laminata armigera Verhoeff (Diplopoda: Xys...

Synergy is known to be vital for the group collaboration among non-kin individuals. In order to evaluate the condition of synergy that initiates group living, we build a model of food intake based on three types of functional response. We show that type III functional response is prerequisite for synergy to allow group living. The optimal number of...

Fibonacci numbers such as 5, 8, and 13 occur in the spiral arrangement of lateral organs at shoot tips in plants. While the cone scales of conifers are normally arranged in 5 and 8 (or 8 and 13) curved rows in opposite directions, other numbers such as 4 and 7 (or 7 and 11) are found anomalously. The observed numbers still obey the Fibonacci rule,...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Sexual dimorphism is a pervasive form of variation within species. Understanding how and why sexual dimorphism evolves would contribute to elucidating the mechanisms underlying the diversification of traits. In flowering plants, pollinators are considered a driver of sexual dimorphism when they affect female and male plant fitness in distinct ways....

Polyembryony is defined as the formation of several embryos from a single egg. This phenomenon can occur in humans, armadillo, and some endoparasitoid insects. However, the mechanism underlying polyembryogenesis in animals remains to be elucidated. The polyembryonic parasitoid wasp Copidosoma floridanum oviposits its egg into an egg of the host ins...

Background: Polyembryony is defined as the formation of several embryos from a single egg. This phenomenon can occur in humans, armadillo, and some endoparasitoid insects. However, the mechanism underlying polyembryogenesis in animals remains to be elucidated. The polyembryonic parasitoid wasp Copidosoma floridanum oviposits its egg into an egg of...

Background: Polyembryony is defined as the formation of several embryos from a single egg. This phenomenon can occur in humans, armadillo, and some endoparasitoid insects. However, the mechanism underlying polyembryogenesis in animals remains to be elucidated. The polyembryonic parasitoid wasp Copidosoma floridanum oviposits its egg into an egg of...

Game theory has been studied extensively to answer why cooperation is promoted in human and animal societies. All games are classified into five games: the Prisoner's Dilemma, chicken game (including hawk-dove game), stag hunt game and two trivial games of either all cooperation or all defect, which are studied separately. Here, we propose a new ga...

Due to the globalization and computerization of financial and economic activities, numerous repetitive leveraged investments have become possible in stock markets and currency exchanges. In reality, repeated leveraged investments up to 100 times/day are possible via online access. With computer-aided programs, this repetition number may easily incr...

In grassland studies, an intermediate level of grazing often results in the highest species diversity. Although a few hypotheses have been proposed to explain this unimodal response of species diversity to grazing intensity, no convincing explanation has been provided. Here, we build a lattice model of a grassland community comprising multiple spec...

The St. Petersburg Paradox contributed to establishing expected utility theory by demonstrating that decision making based on the expectation (expected value, or mean, average) leads to an unreasonable behavior. Although the expected value is commonly used as an optimization criterion in various fields of mathematical sciences, such paradoxical pro...

Self-sacrifice is very rare among organisms. Here, we report a new and astonishing case of adaptive self-sacrifice in a polyembryonic parasitic wasp, Copidosoma floridanum. This wasp is unique in terms of its larval cloning and soldier larvae. Male clone larvae have been found to be killed by female soldier larvae, which suggests intersexual confli...

Background: Polyembryony, when several embryos are clonally produced from a single egg, is found in humans, armadillo, and some endoparasitoid insects. Thus, although polyembryony is conserved through insects to mammals, the polyembryogenesis progress remains obscure in these animals. The polyembryonic parasitoid wasp Copidosoma floridanum oviposit...

The tentorium is the internal skeleton of the head capsule of insects. Several studies have shown that the structure of the tentorium is an important factor not only for the morphology and systematics but also for the phylogeny and evolution. In ants, however, only three studies have reported tentorial morphology so far. We reveal the fundamental s...

The evolutionary origin of periodical mass‐flowering plants (shortly periodical plants), exhibiting periodical mass flowering and death immediately after flowering, has not been demonstrated. Within the genus Strobilanthes (Acanthaceae), which includes more than 50 periodical species, Strobilanthes flexicaulis on Okinawa Island, Japan, flowers greg...

The Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) theory for price variation has been well established in mathematical financial engineering. However, it has been recognized that long-term outcomes in practice may divert from the Black-Scholes formula, which is the expected value of the stochastic process of price changes. While the expected value is expected for the...

The mass application of whole-mitogenome sequencing has great potential for resolving complex phylogeographic patterns that cannot be resolved by partial mitogenomic sequences or nuclear markers. North American periodical cicadas (Magicicada) are well known for their periodical mass emergence at 17-and 13-year intervals in the north and south, resp...

Leaf-like appendages of different plant groups are arranged in common phyllotaxis patterns categorized into two types: spiral and non-spiral arrangements. The adaptive reason for this morphological convergence is unknown. In the non-spiral arrangement, the divergence angle between successive leaves is a simple fraction of 360°, e.g. distichy, decus...

Larval castes are well known in both sexes of polyembryonic parasitic wasps, in which sterile soldier larvae are clonally produced from a single egg and thousands of reproductive larvae develop into adults. The proportion of soldier larvae in Copidosoma floridanum is first determined genetically in both sexes but subsequently increases in females a...

Drought-induced tree death has become a serious problem in global forest ecosystems. Two nonexclusive hypotheses, hydraulic failure and carbon starvation, have been proposed to explain tree die-offs. To clarify the mechanisms, we investigated the physiological processes of drought-induced tree death in saplings with contrasting Huber values (sapwoo...

Ayu fish are actively released by many fishery cooperatives in Japan. These fish exhibit the density-dependent population dynamics within territorial competition. At low density, all fish can hold feeding territories. Once all territory sites are occupied, surplus fish become floaters. As the density further increases, all fish give up their own te...

Vibrational communication is known in some subterranean insects. Except for their use in sexual signaling, vibration behavior has rarely been reported. We report here four distinct types of substrate-based vibration behaviors in the mole cricket, Gryllotalpa orientalis, which are not associated with sexual signaling because of the occurrence of the...

The periodical cicadas of North America ( Magicicada spp.) are well-known for their long life cycles of 13 and 17 years and their mass synchronized emergences. Although periodical cicada life cycles are relatively strict, the biogeographic patterns of periodical cicada broods, or year-classes, indicate that they must undergo some degree of life cyc...

Many animals prefer small local benefits to large but temporally or spatially distant benefits, and this preference is termed “temporal discounting” or “spatial discounting.” Although temporal discounting has been studied in many taxa, only a limited number of papers have primarily focused on spatial discounting. Here, a mate-choice experiment was...

Insects are the most diverse organisms on earth consisting of more than 900 thousand species. However, only few of them are considered agricultural pests. Life history traits such as high fecundity, fast population growth, and high dispersal ability have been used to characterize agricultural pest insects. However, many other non-pest insects also...

Predator-prey systems have been studied intensively for over a hundred years. These studies have demonstrated that the dynamics of Lotka-Volterra (LV) systems are not stable, that is, exhibiting either cyclic oscillation or divergent extinction of one species. Stochastic versions of the deterministic cyclic oscillations also exhibit divergent extin...

Periodical cicadas comprise three species groups containing three pairs of 13- and 17-year life cycle species showing parallel divergence, along with a more anciently diverged 13-year species (Magicicda tredecim). The mechanism and genetic basis of this parallel divergence is unknown. Here we use orthologous transcriptome sequences to explore the d...

Identifying stable polymorphisms is essential for understanding biodiversity. Distinctive polymorphisms are rare in nature because a superior morph should dominate a population. In addition to the three known mechanisms for polymorphism persistence, we recently reported a fourth mechanism: protection of the polymorphism by symbionts. Attending ants...

Classical Lotka-Volterra (LV) competition equation has shown that coexistence of competitive species is only possible when intraspecific competition is stronger than interspecific competition, i.e., the species inhibit their own growth more than the growth of the other species. Note that density effect is assumed to be linear in a classical LV equa...

Ayu fish form feeding territories during a non-breeding (growing) season. When the density of the fish increases, phases gradually change. In the early growing season, all fish can hold territories at low density. Once all territory sites are occupied, newcomers become floaters. As the density further increases, territory holders have to spend much...