Journal of Animal Ecology最新文献

{"title":"Contextually conspicuous species are more likely to be venomous: Habitat-dependent aposematic colouration found throughout snakes.","authors":"Amy Duclaux, Michel Dugon, Kevin Healy","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70351","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Many animals use conspicuous colours to advertise their unprofitability to potential predators, a phenomenon known as aposematism. For example, conspicuous banded patterns in snakes are often highlighted as aposematic signalling of their venomous nature. However, aposematic colouration needs to be analysed while considering a species' environmental context, seen as species which seem conspicuous in isolation may be well camouflaged within their natural environment. Here, we collate images for 458 snake species from iNaturalist and use a novel metric quantifying the degree of conspicuousness of each species compared with its natural context to test the relationship between conspicuousness and the presence, potency and defensive properties of venom. We find that venomous species are significantly more contextually conspicuous compared with non-venomous species. However, while these results provide support for the link between the evolution of aposematism in relation to venom, we do not find an association with the potency or the pain-inducing capacity of venoms with the data used in this study, indicating that these traits may not be important drivers of the evolution of aposematism in snakes. Our novel approach demonstrates how incorporating the environmental context of a species can shed light on our understanding of the evolution of conspicuous colouration.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149109939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spillover dynamics and asynchronous temporal fluctuations in host density and competence drive fungal parasite persistence in multi-host, seasonal communities.","authors":"Sarah A R Schrock, Joseph A DeMarchi, Billy J Gardner, Matthew J Gray, Michel E B Ohmer, Mark Q Wilber","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70333","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1365-2656.70333","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Parasites routinely persist in seasonal systems while infecting multiple host species. An important question for parasite control is whether parasite persistence is driven by particular host species, specific times of year or their interaction. We have few empirically tractable models to answer this question. We develop a data-driven model that partitions species-specific and temporal drivers of parasite persistence from commonly collected surveillance data. Leveraging standard epidemiological theory, our approach demonstrates a novel way to link time-varying fluctuations in species-level contributions to parasite persistence directly to time-integrated parasite persistence in the community as a whole, while using real-world field data that is tractable to obtain. We applied our approach to 3 years of parasite surveillance data in seasonal amphibian communities persisting with the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). We asked three questions: (i) Do amphibians trade-off in their contributions to Bd persistence across the year? (ii) What host characteristics, such as seasonally fluctuating host density or host competence, drive these trade-offs? and (iii) what are the relative contributions of species compared to periods of high transmission for enzootic Bd persistence? We found that the identity of the amphibian species driving Bd persistence was highly variable through time. Specifically, temporal variability in host density and less so variability in host competence drove the temporal variation in species' contributions to persistence. Moreover, our model identified two distinct mechanisms of Bd persistence: (i) spillover dynamics from a dominant maintenance species and (ii) temporally asynchronous, but equal, contributions of host species to persistence. In both cases, species-targeted interventions were as effective or more effective than temporal control for reducing the capacity of Bd to persist. Broadly, our results demonstrate that species contributions to parasite persistence can have strong, asynchronous temporal variability, potentially limiting the effectiveness of targeted seasonal parasite control. Our model is designed to link closely with standard parasite surveillance data and is broadly applicable to other host-parasite systems where it can partition who, when and what drive parasite persistence in multi-host seasonal communities.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":"2104-2118"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13643221/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148684655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"High thermal plasticity, low heritability and constant directional selection on breeding phenology in a viviparous ectotherm.","authors":"Théo Bodineau, Alexis Rutschmann, Jean-François Le Galliard, Manuel Massot, Murielle Richard, Jean Clobert, Sandrine Meylan, Pierre de Villemereuil","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70335","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1365-2656.70335","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Shifting breeding phenology is a widespread response to global warming in ectothermic species such as reptiles, with considerable impacts on reproductive success and population dynamics. Thus, understanding causes and consequences of plasticity and microevolution in breeding phenology is important for determining vulnerability to climate change. Here, we study environmental and individual determinants of breeding phenology, its heritability and the temporal variation of selection on parturition date using a 31-year monitoring of a wild, viviparous population of common lizards (Zootoca vivipara). Warmer daily maximum temperatures during the post-winter activity advanced parturition dates and larger females gave birth earlier, but warmer temperatures also reduced size-related phenological variability. Parturition dates were repeatable but weakly heritable, suggesting that inter-individual consistency of parturition dates may be related to non-heritable factors such as home range quality, nutritional condition or behaviour. In addition, we found evidence for a directional selection towards earlier parturition without fluctuation in time. This study highlights the strong inter-annual thermal plasticity coupled with a limited adaptive potential of breeding phenology in the common lizard. In future, warmer conditions, the interplay between such plasticity and a selection apparently independent from environmental fluctuations would thus essentially depend on the yet unknown costs of thermal plasticity.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":"2133-2146"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13643182/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148759409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unexpected asymmetric Qinghai-Tibetan wildlife dietary response to anthropause: Rapid initial shifts and a slow return.","authors":"Yangheshan Yang, Thomas A Stidham, Xincheng Li, Xingfeng Si","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70336","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1365-2656.70336","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Understanding how wildlife adapts to changes in human activity intensity is crucial for effective conservation in human-modified ecosystems. The 3-year COVID-19 related anthropause in China created an unprecedented experimental setting to examine details of the ecological impact of human absence from otherwise disturbed habitats. We investigated the ecological impact of the anthropause on roadside small mammals by testing if and how their diets changed over a 7-year period spanning before (2018-2019), during (2020-2022) and after (2023-2024) the anthropause, and whether these changes reflected temporary or lasting shifts in human activity. We assessed human impact on a keystone Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau wildlife taxon, pikas (Ochotona spp.), by recording and comparing their diets (using faecal DNA metabarcoding) from roadside and road-distant (non-disturbed) populations. We coupled the dietary differences results with vegetation structure and traffic density records to assess the effects of human activity intensity and infrastructure on dietary composition. Before the anthropause, roadside populations consumed dicot-rich diets distinct from nearby undisturbed meadow populations. During the reduced human activity of the anthropause, roadside pika diets rapidly converged with those of undisturbed populations within a single year, decoupling from local roadside vegetation compositions. After human activity resumed, dietary divergence between roadside and natural populations reappeared slowly across generations. These data reveal an asymmetric, multigenerational response: rapid convergence under reduced disturbance, followed by a slow divergence with the resumption of disturbance. Regression analyses show that traffic density was associated with dietary divergence between habitats and with diet-vegetation dissimilarity in roadside populations. These multigenerational data demonstrate that wildlife in human-modified landscapes remain sensitive to changes in human activity, even after prolonged exposure. Importantly, these asymmetric responses suggest that temporary reductions in human disturbance, such as traffic management, can yield lasting biodiversity benefits in increasingly human-dominated landscapes, and these responses should be explored as part of broader conservation efforts in human-modified ecosystems.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":"2147-2158"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148808602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Male production in green sea turtles under a feminizing climate: A validated model of sex ratios with temperature-dependent sex determination.","authors":"Marc Girondot, Emily Turla, Kirsty Scott, Jeanette Wyneken","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70334","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1365-2656.70334","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) are globally distributed and use tropical and subtropical beaches for nesting. Green turtles exhibit temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), a mechanism by which incubation temperature during a critical developmental window determines offspring sex. As global temperatures rise, many nesting populations could be producing increasingly female-biased sex ratios, raising concerns about long-term population viability. Our ability to assess demographic risks has been hindered by the absence of validated models that accurately convert field-recorded nest temperatures into sex ratios. In this study, we combine high-resolution temperature data from 62 monitored nests with known hatchling sex ratios (n = 594 individuals) to develop and validate a predictive model for sex ratio in green turtles. We developed several methodological innovations to study the impact of temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) under natural conditions. First, we developed a novel approach to quantify spatial temperature heterogeneity (H, range between the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles of the pairwise differences of nest temperatures recorded at the same time) on a nesting beach. The median heterogeneity of the beach is 1.58°C (95% credible interval: 1.52-1.64°C). Second, using a Bayesian mixed-model framework and experimental data from 1480 embryos incubated at constant temperatures under different moisture conditions, we detected genetic and/or maternal differences among clutches in the thermal sensitivity of sex ratio estimates, but no effect of Regional Management Units (RMU). Third, we fitted nine models to estimate field sex ratios; the best-performing model combined a thermal reaction norm of sexualization with a sensitivity function across the thermosensitive period (TSP), showing that both the timing and magnitude of temperature exposure influence sex determination. Our results indicate that males can be produced even under apparent female-producing conditions, due to temperature heterogeneity, temporal autocorrelation of nest temperatures that increased sex ratio variance and non-linear sensitivity to male-producing temperatures. This study establishes a new standard for predicting sex ratios in reptiles with TSD, offering critical insights for population assessments and adaptive conservation planning under changing climatic conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":"2119-2132"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13643197/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148712578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Limited capacity for rapid acclimation to marine heatwaves in coastal invertebrates.","authors":"Mafalda Tomás, Patrice Pottier, Alexandro Autiero, Elena Tamarit-Castro, Alex A Berry, Tamzin A Blewett, Ivan Cadonic, Dustin Doty, Maryane Gradito, Elizabeth C Hoots, Luis L Kuchenmüller, Sidney Martin, Vincent Mélançon, Juliane Vigneault, Timothy D Clark, Zara-Louise Cowan, Fredrik Jutfelt, Leon Green","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70332","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1365-2656.70332","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Marine heatwaves are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide and represent a growing threat to coastal ecosystems and the animals inhabiting them. The vulnerability of marine species to these events depends on several factors, including upper thermal tolerance, the thermal sensitivity of physiological performance, and the capacity for rapid physiological acclimation. We examined upper thermal tolerance and short-term acclimation capacity in 10 mobile macroinvertebrate species inhabiting shallow coastal ecosystems in the Northeast Atlantic. Individuals were exposed either to ambient thermal conditions at 15°C or to a simulated short-term marine heatwave of 5 days at 5°C above ambient temperature. We then measured critical thermal maxima (CT_max) to quantify thermal limits and acclimation responses. Across species, CT_max increased significantly following heatwave exposure, showing that these coastal invertebrates can undergo rapid physiological adjustment. However, the magnitude of the acclimation response was modest, indicating that short-term plasticity provides only limited protection against acute thermal extremes. These limited acclimation responses suggest that some coastal invertebrates may remain vulnerable to intensifying marine heatwaves, particularly taxa with narrow thermal safety margins. Our findings provide an ecologically relevant assessment of thermal performance in coastal invertebrates and contribute to predictions of how nearshore communities may respond to accelerating ocean warming.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":"2088-2103"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13643194/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148760426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing with fire: Wolf response to active wildfires, fire fronts and smoke.","authors":"Skylar Boucher, Katherine Wolfenden, Michael Bridger, Jesse Tigner","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70364","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wildfires are a key natural disturbance in fire-prone ecosystems, but their impacts on wildlife are increasingly significant as fire regimes intensify globally. Although considerable research has examined animal responses to post-wildfire landscapes, little is known about how animals respond to burning fires. While fires often trigger avoidance behaviours, predators may benefit from fire-related hunting opportunities. We present one of the first studies, to our knowledge, explicitly examining fine-scale behavioural responses of a large carnivore to actively burning wildfires, testing whether predators balance the potential risks and benefits associated with these dynamic disturbances. Using integrated step selection analysis, we assessed how wolves respond to active fires (burning areas with flaming or smouldering combustion, and recently extinguished burns), fire fronts (areas with flaming combustion) and smoke in a North American boreal forest. We asked: (i) Do wolves select or avoid active fires, fire fronts, or smoke, or alter their movement rates in response to these disturbances? and (ii) Do active fires, fire fronts or smoke alter wolf selection of habitat? Wolves selected for areas near active fires, particularly longer-lasting ones, but avoided fire fronts, potentially balancing risk avoidance with fire-related predation opportunities. Further, wolves altered their habitat use in ways that offset fire-related risks, including moving faster in smokier conditions and selecting for water and polygonal anthropogenic disturbances near active fires and in smoky areas. Our novel findings on predator behaviours during wildfires highlight the nuanced relationships between predation opportunities and risk avoidance, with implications for predator-prey dynamics in fire-prone regions experiencing increasing wildfire severity, frequency and scale.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149109934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Drought to deluge: Differential impacts of snow on mountain chickadee reproduction across the Sierra Nevada mountains.","authors":"Joseph F Welklin, Lauren E Whitenack, Benjamin R Sonnenberg, Carrie L Branch, Angela M Pitera, Sofia M Haley, Ai Ana H Richmond, Vladimir V Pravosudov","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70361","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Changing climates are reshaping animal populations, but our understanding of how demographic trends are shaped by individual responses to local environmental conditions has historically been limited to long-term studies with restricted spatial scales. Participatory science (i.e. citizen science) programs have improved our ability to identify geographic variation in population-level trends, but these programs often lack insight into the individual-level processes that underly such variation. Here we present a new research framework that uses long-term data to validate participatory science observations as measurements of reproductive success, then explores reproductive responses to environmental variation across large geographic scales. We use this approach to investigate how reproduction in a montane songbird, the mountain chickadee (Poecile gambeli), varies in response to extreme scarcity and extreme accumulation of snow throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains in North America. Reproductive responses to snowfall extremes varied considerably across elevations and latitudes. In the northern Sierra Nevada, mountain chickadee reproductive performance was negatively affected by snow deluge conditions at high elevations, whereas snow drought conditions reduced reproductive output at low elevations. In the central Sierras, drought conditions negatively impacted both elevations, but deluge conditions improved reproductive performance at both low and high elevations. Reproduction in the southern Sierra Nevada was nearly unaffected by spring snow levels. These variable responses to extreme snow accumulation across environments corroborate increasing evidence that biological responses to environmental variation are often nonstationary across spatial scales. Our results show that long-term studies can be used to inform and interpret participatory science data to provide a framework that strengthens our understanding of how individual behaviours underlie differential responses to environmental variation across geographic scales.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149074857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Modelling the effect of temperature on species coexistence.","authors":"Serguei Saavedra, Yuguang Yang, José Ignacio Arroyo, Christopher P Kempes","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70360","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Temperature alters organismal performance and species interactions, yet it remains unclear how generic unimodal thermal responses translate into changes in competitive coexistence. Most existing models emphasize temperatures below the thermal optimum or rely on particular thermal-response formulations. We develop a density-dependent generalized Lotka-Volterra framework for pairwise exploitative competition in which temperature modifies competition through relative resource consumption. Coexistence is quantified using a normalized structural feasibility measure that captures the range of environmental conditions compatible with positive equilibria. The framework yields one structural prediction: pairwise coexistence is maximized when temperature balances the effective competitive asymmetry between competitors. Under symmetric resource overlap, this balance occurs when the two consumption curves intersect. This result is independent of the particular unimodal thermal response function used. We then use representative left-skewed, symmetric and right-skewed unimodal responses to illustrate how thermal response shape influences coexistence. Whereas the analytical balance condition is invariant, stronger ecological patterns-including asymmetries between warming and cooling and the location of the coexistence maximum for species with different thermal optima-depend on the assumed response shape. A qualitative comparison with classic pairwise Drosophila competition experiments at <math><mrow><mn>19</mn></mrow> </math> and <math> <mrow><msup><mn>25</mn> <mo>∘</mo></msup> <mi>C</mi></mrow> </math> is consistent with one illustrative left-skewed parameter regime, but is not intended as a quantitative parameter fit. By separating structural predictions from illustrative thermal response effects, our framework provides a transparent way to connect organismal thermal biology with pairwise competitive coexistence while avoiding reliance on any single thermal performance model.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149069545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beta diversity of Arctiinae moths (Lepidoptera: Erebidae) along a recovering tropical forest gradient.","authors":"Marcel Püls, Mareike Kortmann, Nico Blüthgen, Martin H Schaefer, Dominik Rabl, Mira Thompson, Nina Grella, Julian Bittermann, Hans-Peter Schreier, Paula Sorger, Constance J Tremlett, Annika Busse, Sebastian Seibold, Peter Kriegel, Maria Camila De La Hoz, Rosa Gindhart, Isabelle Busch, Dennis Böttger, David A Donoso, Oliver Mitesser, Jörg Müller, Gunnar Brehm","doi":"10.1111/1365-2656.70359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70359","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Amid widespread biodiversity loss and alarming rates of tropical deforestation, the potential of secondary forest succession in restoring β-diversity is still widely unexplored. To investigate β-diversity along naturally recovering forests, we collected the functionally diverse group of tiger moths (Erebidae: Arctiinae) with light traps in the Ecuadorian Chocó. Our plots ranged from active small-scale agricultural lands over natural regrowth stages (1-38 years) to old-growth forests. Along this gradient of increasing forest complexity, fundamental ecological theory predicts a rise in taxonomic (TBD), functional (FBD) and phylogenetic β-diversity (PBD). We also predicted an increase in body size, insect mimicry and aposematism, as well as a decrease of brightness and wing loading in assemblages along the gradient. To test these predictions, we calculated sample coverage-standardized TBD, FBD and PBD along Hill numbers. Community-weighted means (CWM) and standardized effect sizes of mean functional (ses.MFD) as well as phylogenetic distances (ses.MPD) were calculated to quantify functional and phylogenetic differences among species and communities. TBD and FBD showed non-linear responses with peaks in late recovery forests, with the effect restricted to rare species in FBD but evident for both rare and common species in TBD. In contrast, PBD declined linearly along the gradient only for rare species. While body size and aposematism responded as predicted, communities significantly decreased in mimicry and increased in wing loading along the gradient, contrary to our expectations. The decreasing ses.MFD along the gradient suggests increasing habitat filtering towards old-growth forests. Our study indicates that secondary forests can recover functional traits relatively quickly, while old-growth forests retain more stable and specialized communities, highlighting their continued importance for conservation.</p>","PeriodicalId":14934,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Animal Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149069536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}