Stress response of the honey bee exposed to warming, starvation and neonicotinoids.

Honey bees are the world's most important crop pollinators, but their populations have recently shown significant declines, likely due to multiple stressors. Bees and other insects rely on heat shock proteins (HSP) and antioxidant defense systems to buffer against potentially noxious effects coming from challenges such as rising temperatures, starvation, and pesticide exposure. Nevertheless, our understanding of how combined stressors impact honey bee physiology, and the extent to which HSPs and antioxidants can protect against biomolecular damage, remains incomplete.

One omnivory does not rule them all: The importance of dietary differentiation in the diversification of phyllostomid bats.

Diet specialization in vertebrates can promote diversification while generalist diets may result in evolutionary dead ends, a phenomenon known as the macroevolutionary sink hypothesis. However, generalism or omnivory is often broadly defined and more complex than a single categorical definition, which can bias the effect of diet on diversification dynamics. Here, we developed a novel metric of diet classification and used diet-dependent diversification models to adequately test how diets relate to diversification in an ecologically and morphologically diverse clade of neotropical bats (Phyllostomidae).

Size-dependent variation in thermal tolerance among tropical bee species.

Thermal tolerance is a key determinant of an organism's ability to survive and adapt to environmental changes, particularly in ectothermic insects, which rely on ambient temperature for physiological regulation. While recent research has advanced our understanding of thermal tolerance in insects, particularly in temperate environments, the roles of sociality and morphological traits in shaping this tolerance remain poorly understood in tropical bee species. In this sense, bees exhibit diverse social structures and morphological variations, offering a valuable opportunity to explore how these factors affect thermal tolerance.

Bird Species' Network Centrality Varies Differentially across Species within Their Climatic Niches.

AbstractUnderstanding how the functional role of species within seed dispersal networks varies across geographical and climatic gradients can reveal the drivers of network organization. Because bird-plant interactions differ depending on where these occur, species' centrality (a measurement of species importance in the networks) is expected to vary across species' geographic distributions. Using a global dataset of bird-plant seed dispersal networks, we applied a cross-random mixed effects model to evaluate the variation of 239 bird species' centrality within local networks across their occupied climatic conditions and in response to coexisting bird and plant diversities in those networks.

Bird-window collisions: A comprehensive dataset for the Neotropical region.

Our primary objective was to compile a comprehensive dataset on bird-window collisions throughout the Neotropical region, including both published and unpublished sources. On May 12, 2020, we extensively disseminated invitations to provide data via email and social media platforms. By providing a template worksheet, we required standardized information from collaborators to complete and register their data.

Temporal decay of similarity in bee-plant relationships throughout the day.

Assessing plant-pollinator relationships often employs a snapshot approach to describe the complexity and dynamic involving species interactions. However, this framework overlooks the nuanced changes in species composition, their interactions, and the underlying drivers of such variations. This is particularly evident on less explored temporal scales, such as the dynamic decision-making processes occurring within hours throughout the day.

Duration of Cattle Ranching Affects Dung Beetle Diversity and Secondary Seed Removal in Tropical Dry Forest Landscapes.

Cattle ranching is an economic activity responsible for the loss of large extensions of tropical dry forest around the world. Several studies have demonstrated that the use of inadequate practices of this activity in tropical forests (e.g.

Estimating the impact of the illegal trade of primates in Mexico: a potential threat to wildlife.

The primates of Mexico, Ateles geoffroyi, Alouatta palliata, and Alouatta pigra, are seriously threatened by habitat loss, fragmentation, and illegal hunting and trade. Very little is known about the extent of illegal trade and its impacts on declining primate populations. Our study proposes a potential method based on estimating the number of individuals that die in the trade before being detected and those that probably cannot be detected.

Past, present and future in the geographical distribution of Mexican Tepezmaite cycads: Genus Ceratozamia.

Ceratozamia morettii, C. brevifrons, and C. tenuis are cycads considered endangered in montane forests in the center of Veracruz state.

Geographic range size and species morphology determines the organization of sponge host-guest interaction networks across tropical coral reefs.

Sponges are widely spread organisms in the tropical reefs of the American Northwest-Atlantic Ocean, they structure ecosystems and provide services such as shelter, protection from predators, and food sources to a wide diversity of both vertebrates and invertebrates species. The high diversity of sponge-associated fauna can generate complex networks of species interactions over small and large spatial-temporal gradients. One way to start uncovering the organization of the sponge host-guest complex networks is to understand how the accumulated geographic area, the sponge morphology and, sponge taxonomy contributes to the connectivity of sponge species within such networks.

Species-level drivers of avian centrality within seed-dispersal networks across different levels of organisation.

Bird-plant seed-dispersal networks are structural components of ecosystems. The role of bird species in seed-dispersal networks (from less [peripheral] to more connected [central]), determines the interaction patterns and their ecosystem services. These roles may be driven by morphological and functional traits as well as evolutionary, geographical and environmental properties acting at different spatial extents.

Invasive Plant Species Driving the Biotic Homogenization of Plant-Frugivore Interactions in the Atlantic Forest Biodiversity Hotspot.

Although biological invasions are a common and intensively studied phenomenon, most studies often ignore the biotic interactions that invasive species play in the environment. Here, we evaluated how and why invasive plant species are interconnected within the overall frugivory network of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, an important global biodiversity hotspot. To do this, we used the recently published Atlantic Frugivory Dataset to build a meta-network (i.

Configuration and composition of human-dominated tropical landscapes affect the prevalence and average intensity of mite and fly infestation in Phyllostomidae bats.

The conversion of natural areas into agricultural landscapes results in different mosaics of land use types, modifying biodiversity and consequently altering the patterns of ecological interactions, such as between frugivorous bats and ectoparasites. Our objectives were to investigate whether variations in the configuration and composition of human-disturbed landscapes interfere with the prevalence and average intensity of ectoparasite infestation in the frugivorous bats Artibeus lituratus (Olfers, 1818), Carollia perspicillata (Linnaeus, 1758), and Sturnira lilium (É Geoffroy, 1810), in a region of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We also evaluated whether there is a response in the parasite load associated with the ectoparasite group (mite or fly).

Fish-parasite interactions: A dataset of continental waters in Mexico involving fishes and their helminth fauna.

Most of the available knowledge in the literature on Mexican fishes and their parasites refers to information within political divisions and/or hydrological basins in the country. Indeed, only a few studies have analyzed the helminth fauna of these vertebrates as a biological group distributed nation-wide. This lack of available knowledge prevents the study of several basic and applied aspects involving fish-parasite interactions at different spatial and temporal scales.

Above- and below-ground trait coordination in tree seedlings depend on the most limiting resource: a test comparing a wet and a dry tropical forest in Mexico.

The study of above- and below-ground organ plant coordination is crucial for understanding the biophysical constraints and trade-offs involved in species' performance under different environmental conditions. Environmental stress is expected to increase constraints on species trait combinations, resulting in stronger coordination among the organs involved in the acquisition and processing of the most limiting resource. To test this hypothesis, we compared the coordination of trait combinations in 94 tree seedling species from two tropical forest systems in Mexico: dry and moist.

NEOTROPICAL FRESHWATER FISHES: A dataset of occurrence and abundance of freshwater fishes in the Neotropics.

The Neotropical region hosts 4225 freshwater fish species, ranking first among the world's most diverse regions for freshwater fishes. Our NEOTROPICAL FRESHWATER FISHES data set is the first to produce a large-scale Neotropical freshwater fish inventory, covering the entire Neotropical region from Mexico and the Caribbean in the north to the southern limits in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay. We compiled 185,787 distribution records, with unique georeferenced coordinates, for the 4225 species, represented by occurrence and abundance data.

Successive Pandemic Waves with Different Virulent Strains and the Effects of Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2.

One hundred years after the flu pandemic of 1918, the world faces an outbreak of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a novel coronavirus. With a high transmissibility, the pandemic has spread worldwide, creating a scenario of devastation in many countries. By the middle of 2021, about 3% of the world population had been infected and more than 4 million people had died.

Climate variability and aridity modulate the role of leaf shelters for arthropods: A global experiment.

Current climate change is disrupting biotic interactions and eroding biodiversity worldwide. However, species sensitive to aridity, high temperatures, and climate variability might find shelter in microclimatic refuges, such as leaf rolls built by arthropods. To explore how the importance of leaf shelters for terrestrial arthropods changes with latitude, elevation, and climate, we conducted a distributed experiment comparing arthropods in leaf rolls versus control leaves across 52 sites along an 11,790 km latitudinal gradient.

Subtle structures with not-so-subtle functions: A data set of arthropod constructs and their host plants.

The construction of shelters on plants by arthropods might influence other organisms via changes in colonization, community richness, species composition, and functionality. Arthropods, including beetles, caterpillars, sawflies, spiders, and wasps often interact with host plants via the construction of shelters, building a variety of structures such as leaf ties, tents, rolls, and bags; leaf and stem galls, and hollowed out stems. Such constructs might have both an adaptive value in terms of protection (i.