Andrew Orkney, Priscila S Rothier, Brandon P Hedrick
{"title":"Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.","authors":"Andrew Orkney, Priscila S Rothier, Brandon P Hedrick","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1647","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1647","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Birds have repeatedly evolved diverse developmental strategies, including multiple origins of sophisticated parental care, making them a model system to explore the consequences of developmental strategy upon phenotypic evolution. Here, we assess evolutionary covariance between limb proportions and ecological diversity of different bird lineages with altricial (high parental care) or precocial (lower parental care) developmental strategies. In addition, we model overall rates of evolutionary divergence between wing and leg skeletal proportions, allowing us to investigate the influence of developmental strategy upon adaptive traits. We show that while wing and leg proportions evolve independently of one another in altricial lineages, conforming to a modular pattern of evolution attested in birds more generally, there are strong correlations between wing and leg trait evolution in precocial lineages. Unlike precocial groups, divergent wing and leg evolution in altricial lineages is associated with access to novel flight-style combinations and is strongly associated with body mass. This suggests an adaptive association with mechanisms of growth and development. Inspection of internal wing proportions within major clades demonstrates that lineages with more altricial developmental strategies explore a wider range of mechanically relevant wing proportions, such as Brachial Index.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2056","pages":"20251647"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12503937/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regression to the mean explains perception of action consequences.","authors":"Saskia Johnen, Eckart Zimmermann","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1715","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1715","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Predictions shape the perceptual consequences of our own actions such that self-generated events appear less intense to us. However, recent studies also reported sensory enhancement of self-produced sounds. Here, we tested whether sensory attenuation and enhancement are signatures of an adaptation to the mean sound statistics. In 330 human participants, we tested the idea that predictions about upcoming sounds shift auditory processing to the average sound context. Participants produced sounds between 40 and 80 decibels (dB) and rated their loudness. Estimates of perceived loudness followed a regression to the mean sound level. The effect was similar for self-produced and passively observed but temporally predictable tones, suggesting predictability alone drives perceptual changes. We then artificially created a new mean sound level by presenting sessions in which subjects mostly (80% of trials) produced either loud (80 dB) or quiet (40 dB) tones. In loud contexts, rarely presented quiet tones were enhanced, and in quiet contexts, loud tones were attenuated. Our results challenge the dominant forward model explanation, which attributes sensory attenuation to predictive suppression of self-generated stimuli, and instead open the door for alternative explanations. Our findings point to regression towards the mean sound level as the most plausible account for predictable sounds.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2057","pages":"20251715"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12520771/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145295011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Julieta Vigliano Relva, Carl Van Colen, Gilles Lepoint, Marleen De Troch
{"title":"Food quality mediates the temperature-size rule in a marine primary consumer: evidence from trophic biomarkers.","authors":"Julieta Vigliano Relva, Carl Van Colen, Gilles Lepoint, Marleen De Troch","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1779","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1779","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The temperature-size rule predicts that rising temperatures lead to smaller adult sizes with important consequences for fitness, but how this response interacts with temperature-driven changes in food quality remains unclear. Fatty acids are critical indicators of good food quality and hold the potential to unravel these interactions, while stable isotopes can reveal metabolic responses. In a fully crossed factorial design, the benthic copepod <i>Tachidius discipes</i> was grown at 15 and 24°C and fed with fatty acid content varying diatoms resulting from culturing <i>Nitzschia</i> sp. at these respective temperatures. Our results show temperature and food quality impacted synergistically on copepods: body and clutch size decreased by 10% and 40%, respectively, at 24°C, with good-quality food alleviating the body size effect and increasing clutch size at 15°C. Increased copepod Δ<sup>13</sup>C, reflecting increased metabolic demands, was found at elevated temperatures and when fed with poor-quality food. Multiple regression models highlighted the importance of specific ω-3 and ω-6 fatty acids for body and clutch size, supporting our conclusion that metabolic and food quality-mediated responses to temperature rise resulted in energetic imbalances that mediated the interaction between food quality and the temperature-size rule with negative consequences for reproductive output.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2056","pages":"20251779"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12503945/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Barbora Trubenová, Jacqueline Hellinga, Jürgen Krücken, Georg von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Hinrich Schulenburg, Roland R Regoes
{"title":"Investigating the consequences of the mating system for drug resistance evolution in <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>.","authors":"Barbora Trubenová, Jacqueline Hellinga, Jürgen Krücken, Georg von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Hinrich Schulenburg, Roland R Regoes","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1181","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1181","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The rise of anthelmintic-resistant strains in livestock threatens both animal and human health. Understanding the factors influencing anthelmintic resistance is crucial to mitigate the threat posed by these parasites. Due to difficulties in studying parasitic worms in the laboratory, the non-parasitic nematode <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> is used as a model organism to investigate anthelmintic resistance evolution. However, the suitability of this free-living nematode as a model for parasitic worms is debatable due to its rare androdioecious reproductive system, raising questions about the generalizability of findings from evolutionary experiments in <i>C. elegans</i> to other species. In this study, we developed a polygenic, population genetic model combined with pharmacodynamic approaches to investigate the effects of reproductive strategy and other aspects, such as dominance, mutational effects, the number of loci and population size, on determining the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary processes. We found that androdioecious populations showed both rapid initial adaptation typical for hermaphrodites and tolerance to high drug concentrations observed in dioecious populations. They also exhibited the highest diversity and shortest time for the fixation of the beneficial allele. These results suggest that androdioecious populations can harness the advantages of both selfing and outcrossing, optimizing their reproductive strategy in response to drug selection.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2057","pages":"20251181"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12520790/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145294976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tiffany L T Ki, Colin M Beale, Blanca Huertas, Jane K Hill
{"title":"Little long-term change in regional species richness of tropical butterflies over the past 166 years masks turnover in community composition.","authors":"Tiffany L T Ki, Colin M Beale, Blanca Huertas, Jane K Hill","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1772","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1772","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Most information on biodiversity changes is from the last few decades despite species responding to environmental changes for centuries. Longer-term information is needed to contextualize whether recent changes reflect longer-term trends. We focus on tropical regions, which are exceptionally biodiverse but contain many species that are currently threatened. We integrate historical and contemporary data from museum collections and online records for 45 butterfly species from Sulawesi (Indonesia) to explore species richness trends over the past 166 years (1857-2022), test whether recent trends mirror longer-term trends and examine whether species that are endemic, forest-dependent and/or host-plant specialists have declined the most. Over the 166-year time period, we found no systematic decline in overall species richness, despite shorter-term multi-decadal changes (positive, stable and negative trends). Recent trends generally did not match longer-term trends. Contrary to expectation, we found long-term increases in some species, particularly those that are non-endemic or open-habitat tolerant, whereas endemic and/or forest-dependent species showed more mixed trends, either stable or declining. We find long-term stability in regional species richness, but this masks composition changes that include more non-endemic and open-habitat species over time. Short-term fluctuations, spanning a few decades, did not reflect longer-term patterns, highlighting challenges in determining robust patterns of biodiversity change.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2057","pages":"20251772"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12520781/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145295006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jessie A Thuma, Genevieve Pugesek, Erin D Treanore, Sylvana R Finn, Elizabeth E Crone
{"title":"Bumble bee nest density is lower in drought years.","authors":"Jessie A Thuma, Genevieve Pugesek, Erin D Treanore, Sylvana R Finn, Elizabeth E Crone","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1010","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Climate change is driving more frequent and intense droughts in many parts of the world. While we hold a broad understanding of how drought impacts plant populations, predicting drought's demographic effects on animal populations remains a challenge, particularly for invertebrates. Here, we use 7 years of bumble bee nest surveys spanning a period with two historic droughts to estimate impacts of drought on bumble bee nest abundance and apparent survival. Nest abundance significantly declined with drought (overall average of 19.3 versus 11.3 nests in non-drought versus drought years). Relative nest abundances of <i>Bombus impatiens</i> and <i>Bombus griseocollis</i>, two common species in this system, did not change with drought despite differences in life history and apparent survival. <i>B. impatiens</i> abundance in forests increased during droughts (approx. 60% of nests in forests versus 20-40% in drought versus non-drought years). Nests of rarer species were absent from our survey area after the first of the two droughts, but the two common species recovered quickly in the year after each drought. This study demonstrates that well-known effects of drought on floral resources likely translate to population-level impacts in bumble bees. It also highlights the importance of long-term monitoring for detecting impacts of intermittent environmental disturbances.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2056","pages":"20251010"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12503952/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lynne Caddy, Tessy M Muñoz-Campos, Julian Baur, Loke von Schmalensee, David Berger
{"title":"The reliability of environmental cues shape learning and selection against deleterious alleles in seed beetles.","authors":"Lynne Caddy, Tessy M Muñoz-Campos, Julian Baur, Loke von Schmalensee, David Berger","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.0992","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.0992","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Behavioural plasticity can play a key role in evolution by either facilitating or impeding genetic adaptation. The latter occurs when behaviours mitigate selection pressures that otherwise would target associated traits. Therefore, environments that facilitate adaptive behavioural plasticity could relax the strength of natural selection, but experimental evidence for this prediction remains scarce. Here, we first demonstrate that maternal care behaviour in the beetle <i>Callosobruchus maculatus</i> is dependent on environmental cues that allow females to reduce larval competition via learning and informed oviposition choices. We show that this facilitation of maternal care relaxes selection against deleterious alleles in offspring. We further find that mothers of low genetic quality generally provide poorer care. However, when receiving environmental cues providing accurate information about future host-quality, the increased opportunity for adaptive behavioural plasticity reduced genetic differences in maternal care, further relaxing selection against deleterious alleles. We use our data to illustrate how the identified link between adaptive behavioural plasticity in maternal care and the strength of natural selection can impact indirect genetic effects between mothers and offspring and the accumulation of cryptic genetic loads in populations inhabiting predictable environments.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2056","pages":"20250992"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12503935/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals.","authors":"Kristen E Saban, John J Wiens","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1717","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.1717","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Biodiversity loss is one of the greatest challenges facing Earth today. The most direct information on species losses comes from recent extinctions. However, our understanding of these recent, human-related extinctions is incomplete across life, especially their causes and their rates and patterns among clades, across habitats and over time. Furthermore, prominent studies have extrapolated from these extinctions to suggest a current mass extinction event. Such extrapolations assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time and among environments. Here, we analyse rates and patterns of recent extinctions (last 500 years). Surprisingly, past extinctions did not strongly predict current risk among groups. Extinctions varied strongly among groups, and were most frequent among molluscs and some tetrapods, and relatively rare in plants and arthropods. Extinction rates have increased over the last five centuries, but generally declined in the last 100 years. Recent extinctions were predominantly on islands, whereas the majority of non-island extinctions were in freshwater. Island extinctions were most frequently related to invasive species, but habitat loss was the most important cause (and current threat) in continental regions. Overall, we identify the major patterns in recent extinctions but caution against extrapolating them into the future.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2057","pages":"20251717"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12520767/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145294980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sissel Sjöberg, Pablo Macías-Torres, Arne Andersson, Johan Bäckman, Kasper Thorup, Anders Peter Tøttrup, Thomas Alerstam
{"title":"The structure of the annual migratory flight activity in a songbird.","authors":"Sissel Sjöberg, Pablo Macías-Torres, Arne Andersson, Johan Bäckman, Kasper Thorup, Anders Peter Tøttrup, Thomas Alerstam","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.0958","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.0958","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Migratory songbirds have an internal circannual genetic programme that controls the timing and extent of migratory flight activity, as demonstrated by experiments with birds held in cages. We used multisensor data loggers to record the timing and duration of all migratory flights during the annual cycle of 15 free-living individuals of red-backed shrikes <i>Lanius collurio</i>. Annual actograms unexpectedly revealed that the nocturnal migratory flights of the shrikes were organized in a highly structured way, with flights aggregated into segments that could be readily identified for all individuals, showing low variability and thus high consistency between individuals. These results suggest that the execution of migratory flights is under a high degree of control according to a rather detailed internal travelling plan for the annual migration cycle. Potentially, the control of migratory flight under natural conditions depends on a complex feedback process where external cues associated with the geographic, temporal and nutritional situation of the bird are required for the internal programme to properly regulate the successive segmental flight steps of the migratory journey. This would mean that the internal/genetic programme for control of bird migration is much more dynamic and complex than hereto assumed.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2057","pages":"20250958"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12520768/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145294982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elizabeth A Tibbetts, Chloe Weise, Juanita Pardo-Sanchez, An Na Vi
{"title":"Individual recognition is associated with viewpoint-independent face recognition in a species-specific way.","authors":"Elizabeth A Tibbetts, Chloe Weise, Juanita Pardo-Sanchez, An Na Vi","doi":"10.1098/rspb.2025.2045","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rspb.2025.2045","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Identifying three-dimensional signals (e.g. faces) can be challenging because the signals appear different when seen from different viewpoints. One simple solution is to always view signals from a particular viewpoint. A more flexible but also more cognitively challenging solution is viewpoint-independent recognition, where receivers can identify signals from multiple viewing angles. Here, we use same/different concept learning to test viewpoint-independent recognition for conspecific and heterospecific faces in two species of <i>Polistes</i> paper wasps that have three-dimensional visual signals. <i>P. fuscatus</i> use conspecific facial patterns for individual recognition, while <i>P. dominula</i> use conspecific facial patterns as a signal of fighting ability. Previous work has shown that <i>P. fuscatus</i> are able to identify novel viewpoints of conspecific faces through extrapolation. Here, we show that <i>P. fuscatus</i> and <i>P. dominula</i> differ in their capacity for viewpoint-independent recognition. <i>P. fuscatus</i> exhibit viewpoint-independent recognition for both <i>P. fuscatus</i> and <i>P. dominula</i> faces. In contrast, <i>P. dominula</i> do not have viewpoint-independent recognition for conspecific or heterospecific faces. These results suggest that viewpoint-independent recognition through extrapolation may be an adaptive strategy to facilitate individual face recognition across a wide range of taxa.</p>","PeriodicalId":520757,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. Biological sciences","volume":"292 2056","pages":"20252045"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12503951/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}