Climate velocities and species tracking in global mountain regions.

Mountain ranges contain high concentrations of endemic species and are indispensable refugia for lowland species that are facing anthropogenic climate change1,2. Forecasting biodiversity redistribution hinges on assessing whether species can track shifting isotherms as the climate warms3,4. However, a global analysis of the velocities of isotherm shifts along elevation gradients is hindered by the scarcity of weather stations in mountainous regions5. Here we address this issue by mapping the lapse rate of temperature (LRT) across mountain regions globally, both by using satellite data (SLRT) and by using the laws of thermodynamics to account for water vapour6 (that is, the moist adiabatic lapse rate (MALRT)). By dividing the rate of surface warming from 1971 to 2020 by either the SLRT or the MALRT, we provide maps of vertical isotherm shift velocities. We identify 17 mountain regions with exceptionally high vertical isotherm shift velocities (greater than 11.67 m per year for the SLRT; greater than 8.25 m per year for the MALRT), predominantly in dry areas but also in wet regions with shallow lapse rates; for example, northern Sumatra, the Brazilian highlands and southern Africa. By linking these velocities to the velocities of species range shifts, we report instances of close tracking in mountains with lower climate velocities. However, many species lag behind, suggesting that range shift dynamics would persist even if we managed to curb climate-change trajectories. Our findings are key for devising global conservation strategies, particularly in the 17 high-velocity mountain regions that we have identified.

Environmental quality mediates the ecological dominance of cooperatively breeding birds.

Although social species as diverse as humans and ants are among the most abundant organisms on Earth, animals cooperate and form groups for many reasons. How these different reasons for grouping affect a species' ecological dominance remains unknown. Here we use a theoretical model to demonstrate that the different fitness benefits that animals receive by forming groups depend on the quality of their environment, which in turn impacts their ecological dominance and resilience to global change. We then test the model's key predictions using phylogenetic comparative analysis of >6500 bird species. As predicted, we find that cooperative breeders occurring in harsh and fluctuating environments have larger ranges and greater abundances than non-cooperative breeders, but cooperative breeders occurring in benign and stable environments do not. Using our model, we further show that social species living in harsh and fluctuating environments will be less vulnerable to climate change than non-social species.

Higher temperature variability in deforested mountain regions impacts the competitive advantage of nocturnal species.

Deforestation is a major contributor to biodiversity loss, yet the impact of forest loss on daily microclimate variability and its implications for species with different daily activity patterns remain poorly understood. Using a recently developed microclimate model, we investigated the effects of deforestation on the daily temperature range (DTR) in low-elevation tropical regions and high-elevation temperate regions. Our results show that deforestation substantially increases DTR in these areas, suggesting a potential impact on species interactions. To test this hypothesis, we studied the competitive interactions between nocturnal burying beetles and all-day-active blowfly maggots in forested and deforested habitats in Taiwan. We show that deforestation leads to increased DTR at higher elevations, which enhances the competitiveness of blowfly maggots during the day and leads to a higher failure rate of carcass burial by the beetles at night. Thus, deforestation-induced temperature variability not only modulates exploitative competition between species with different daily activity patterns, but also likely exacerbates the negative impacts of climate change on nocturnal organisms. In order to limit potential adverse effects on species interactions and their ecological functions, our study highlights the need to protect forests, especially in areas where deforestation can greatly alter temperature variability.

Antagonistic effects of long- and short-term environmental variation on species coexistence.

Assessing the impact of environmental fluctuations on species coexistence is critical for understanding biodiversity loss and the ecological impacts of climate change. Yet determining how properties like the intensity, frequency or duration of environmental fluctuations influence species coexistence remains challenging, presumably because previous studies have focused on indefinite coexistence. Here, we model the impact of environmental fluctuations at different temporal scales on species coexistence over a finite time period by employing the concepts of time-windowed averaging and performance curves to incorporate temporal niche differences within a stochastic Lotka-Volterra model. We discover that short- and long-term environmental variability has contrasting effects on transient species coexistence, such that short-term variation favours species coexistence, whereas long-term variation promotes competitive exclusion. This dichotomy occurs because small samples (e.g. environmental changes over long time periods) are more likely to show large deviations from the expected mean and are more difficult to predict than large samples (e.g. environmental changes over short time periods), as described in the central limit theorem. Consequently, we show that the complex set of relationships among environmental fluctuations and species coexistence found in previous studies can all be synthesized within a general framework by explicitly considering both long- and short-term environmental variation.

A chemically triggered transition from conflict to cooperation in burying beetles.

Although interspecific competition has long been recognised as a major driver of trait divergence and adaptive evolution, relatively little effort has focused on how it influences the evolution of intraspecific cooperation. Here we identify the mechanism by which the perceived pressure of interspecific competition influences the transition from intraspecific conflict to cooperation in a facultative cooperatively breeding species, the Asian burying beetle Nicrophorus nepalensis. We not only found that beetles are more cooperative at carcasses when blowfly maggots have begun to digest the tissue, but that this social cooperation appears to be triggered by a single chemical cue - dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) - emitted from carcasses consumed by blowflies, but not from control carcasses lacking blowflies. Our results provide experimental evidence that interspecific competition promotes the transition from intraspecific conflict to cooperation in N. nepalensis via a surprisingly simple social chemical cue that is a reliable indicator of resource competition between species.

Social rank modulates how environmental quality influences cooperation and conflict within animal societies.

Although dominance hierarchies occur in most societies, our understanding of how these power structures influence individual investment in cooperative and competitive behaviours remains elusive. Both conflict and cooperation in animal societies are often environmentally regulated, yet how individuals alter their cooperative and competitive investments as environmental quality changes remain unclear. Using game theoretic modelling, we predict that individuals of all ranks will invest more in cooperation and less in social conflict in harsh environments than individuals of the same ranks in benign environments. Counterintuitively, low-ranking subordinates should increase their investment in cooperation proportionally more than high-ranking dominants, suggesting that subordinates contribute relatively more when facing environmental challenges. We then test and confirm these predictions experimentally using the Asian burying beetle Nicrophorus nepalensis. Ultimately, we demonstrate how social rank modulates the relationships between environmental quality and cooperative and competitive behaviours, a topic crucial for understanding the evolution of complex societies.

Contrasting forms of competition set elevational range limits of species.

How abiotic and biotic factors constrain distribution limits at the harsh and benign edges of species ranges is hotly debated, partly because macroecological experiments testing the proximate causes of distribution limits are scarce. It has long been recognized - at least since Darwin's On the Origin of Species - that a harsh climate strengthens competition and thus sets species range limits. Using thorough field manipulations along a large elevation gradient, we show the mechanisms by which temperature determines competition type, resulting in a transition from interference to exploitative competition from the lower to the upper elevation limits in burying beetles (Nicrophorus nepalensis). This transition is an example of Darwin's classic hypothesis that benign climates favor direct competition for highly accessible resources while harsh climates result in competition through resources of high rivalry. We propose that identifying the properties of these key resources will provide a more predictive framework to understand the interplay between biotic and abiotic factors in determining geographic range limits.

A continuum of biological adaptations to environmental fluctuation.

Bet-hedging-a strategy that reduces fitness variance at the expense of lower mean fitness among different generations-is thought to evolve as a biological adaptation to environmental unpredictability. Despite widespread use of the bet-hedging concept, most theoretical treatments have largely made unrealistic demographic assumptions, such as non-overlapping generations and fixed or infinite population sizes. Here, we extend the concept to consider overlapping generations by defining bet-hedging as a strategy with lower variance and mean per capita growth rate across different environments. We also define an opposing strategy-the rising-tide-that has higher mean but also higher variance in per capita growth. These alternative strategies lie along a continuum of biological adaptions to environmental fluctuation. Using stochastic Lotka-Volterra models to explore the evolution of the rising-tide versus bet-hedging strategies, we show that both the mean environmental conditions and the temporal scales of their fluctuations, as well as whether population dynamics are discrete or continuous, are crucial in shaping the type of strategy that evolves in fluctuating environments. Our model demonstrates that there are likely to be a wide range of ways that organisms with overlapping generations respond to environmental unpredictability beyond the classic bet-hedging concept.

Nest predation predicts infanticide in a cooperatively breeding bird.

In cooperatively breeding species, social conflict is typically assumed to underlie destructive behaviours like infanticide. However, an untested alternative hypothesis in birds is that infanticide in the form of egg tossing may simply be a parental response to partial nest predation representing a life-history trade-off. We examined egg tossing behaviour in the colonial and cooperatively breeding grey-capped social weaver (Pseudonigrita arnaudi), a plural breeder in which pairs nest separately, often in the same tree. Using infrared nest cameras, we found that 78% of the tossing events from 2012 to 2017 were committed by parents, suggesting that social conflict is unlikely to be the main reason underlying egg tossing in this species. Instead, reductions in clutch size due to both natural and experimentally simulated predation induced parental egg tossing. Our study suggests that destructive behaviour in cooperatively breeding birds can be shaped by a variety of mechanisms beyond social conflict and that alternative hypotheses must be considered when studying the adaptive significance of infanticide in group-living species.

The ecology of cooperative breeding behaviour.

Ecology is a fundamental driving force for the evolutionary transition from solitary living to breeding cooperatively in groups. However, the fact that both benign and harsh, as well as stable and fluctuating, environments can favour the evolution of cooperative breeding behaviour constitutes a paradox of environmental quality and sociality. Here, we propose a new model - the dual benefits framework - for resolving this paradox. Our framework distinguishes between two categories of grouping benefits - resource defence benefits that derive from group-defended critical resources and collective action benefits that result from social cooperation among group members - and uses insider-outsider conflict theory to simultaneously consider the interests of current group members (insiders) and potential joiners (outsiders) in determining optimal group size. We argue that the different grouping benefits realised from resource defence and collective action profoundly affect insider-outsider conflict resolution, resulting in predictable differences in the per capita productivity, stable group size, kin structure and stability of the social group. We also suggest that different types of environmental variation (spatial vs. temporal) select for societies that form because of the different grouping benefits, thus helping to resolve the paradox of why cooperative breeding evolves in such different types of environments.

Fishing-induced changes in adult length are mediated by skipped-spawning.

Elucidating fishing effects on fish population dynamics is a critical step toward sustainable fisheries management. Despite previous studies that have suggested age or size truncation in exploited fish populations, other aspects of fishing effects on population demography, e.g., via altering life histories and density, have received less attention. Here, we investigated the fishing effects altering adult demography via shifting reproductive trade-offs in the iconic, overexploited, Pacific bluefin tuna Thunnus orientalis. We found that, contrary to our expectation, mean lengths of catch increased over time in longline fisheries. On the other hand, mean catch lengths for purse seine fisheries did not show such increasing trends. We hypothesized that the size-dependent energetic cost of the spawning migration and elevated fishing mortality on the spawning grounds potentially drive size-dependent skipped spawning for adult tuna, mediating the observed changes in the catch lengths. Using eco-genetic individual-based modeling, we demonstrated that fishing-induced evolution of skipped spawning and size truncation interacted to shape the observed temporal changes in mean catch lengths for tuna. Skipped spawning of the small adults led to increased mean catch lengths for the longline fisheries, while truncation of small adults by the purse seines could offset such a pattern. Our results highlight the eco-evolutionary dynamics of fishing effects on population demography and caution against using demographic traits as a basis for fisheries management of the Pacific bluefin tuna as well as other migratory species.

Group size and social conflict in complex societies.

Conflicts of interest over resources or reproduction among individuals in a social group have long been considered to result in automatic and universal costs to group living. However, exploring how social conflict varies with group size has produced mixed empirical results. Here we develop a model that generates alternative predictions for how social conflict should vary with group size depending on the type of benefits gained from being in a social group. We show that a positive relationship between social conflict and group size is favored when groups form primarily for the benefits of sociality but not when groups form mainly for accessing group-defended resources. Thus, increased social conflict in animal societies should not be viewed as an automatic cost of larger social groups. Instead, studying the relationship between social conflict and the types of grouping benefits will be crucial for understanding the evolution of complex societies.

Revisiting the ecology and evolution of burying beetle behavior (Staphylinidae: Silphinae).

Investigating fundamental processes in biology requires the ability to ground broad questions in species-specific natural history. This is particularly true in the study of behavior because an organism's experience of the environment will influence the expression of behavior and the opportunity for selection. Here, we provide a review of the natural history and behavior of burying beetles of the genus Nicrophorus to provide the groundwork for comparative work that showcases their remarkable behavioral and ecological diversity. Burying beetles have long fascinated scientists because of their well-developed parenting behavior, exhibiting extended post-hatching care of offspring that varies extensively within and across taxa. Despite the burgeoning success of burying beetles as a model system for the study of behavioral evolution, there has not been a review of their behavior, ecology, and evolution in over 25 years. To address this gap, we leverage a developing community of researchers who have contributed to a detailed knowledge of burying beetles to highlight the utility of Nicrophorus for investigating the causes and consequences of social and behavioral evolution.

Cooperation and Lateral Forces: Moving Beyond Bottom-Up and Top-Down Drivers of Animal Population Dynamics.

Biologists have long known that animal population dynamics are regulated by a combination of bottom-up (resource availability) and top-down forces (predation). Yet, economists have argued that human population dynamics can also be influenced by intraspecific cooperation. Despite awareness of the role of interspecific cooperation (mutualism) in influencing resource availability and animal population dynamics, the role of intraspecific cooperation (sociality) under different environmental conditions has rarely been considered. Here we examine the role of what we call "lateral forces" that act within populations and interact with external top-down and bottom-up forces in influencing population dynamics using an individual-based model linking environmental quality, intraspecific cooperation, and population size. We find that the proportion of cooperators is higher when the environment is poor and population sizes are greatest under intermediate resources levels due to the contrasting effects of resource availability on behavior and population size. We also show that social populations are more resilient to environmental change than non-social ones because the benefits of intraspecific cooperation can outweigh the effects of constrained resource availability. Our study elucidates the complex relationship between environmental harshness, cooperation, and population dynamics, which is important for understanding the ecological consequences of cooperation.

Parental care, cost of reproduction and reproductive skew: a general costly young model.

Understanding the mechanisms by which animals resolve conflicts of interest is the key to understanding the basis of cooperation in social species. Conflict over reproductive portioning is the critical type of conflict among cooperative breeders. The costly young model represents an important, but underappreciated, idea about how an individual's intrinsic condition and cost of reproduction should affect the resolution of conflict over the distribution of reproduction within a cooperatively breeding group. However, dominant control in various forms and fixed parental care (offspring fitness dependent solely on total brood size) are assumed in previous versions of costly young models. Here, we develop a general costly young model by relaxing the restrictive assumptions of existing models. Our results show that (1) when the complete-control assumption is relaxed, the costly young model behaves very differently from the original model, and (2) when the fixed parental care assumption is relaxed, the costly young-costly care model displays similar predictions to the tug-of-war model, although the underlying mechanisms causing these similar patterns are different. These results, we believe, help simplify the seemingly divergent predictions of different reproductive skew models and highlight the importance of studying the group members' intrinsic conditions, costs of producing young, and costs of parental care for understanding breeding conflict resolution in cooperatively breeding animals.

The brave leader game and the timing of altruism among nonkin.

The evolution of cooperation among nonkin remains a puzzle, and almost no theoretical work has examined the timing of altruism, that is, when a behavior that benefits others at one's own fitness expense should be expressed in time. We present an evolutionary dynamic-game model to address the question of when, if ever, an altruist would voluntarily emerge in time in groups of nonrelatives. Our model shows that when the benefit of having an altruistic leader decays with time, leaders will eventually emerge and will emerge later (i) in larger groups, (ii) when the cost of leadership increases, and (iii) when the assessment interval increases. The model applies to diverse situations in which time-decaying group benefits are obtained only after a group member assumes a leadership role at some cost to itself, including leader roles in foraging flocks and migration groups in birds and spiny lobsters and in high-risk foraging in desert ants.

Reproductive skew theory unified: the general bordered tug-of-war model.

Reproductive skew has been identified as a major dimension along which animal societies vary. Two major kinds of reproductive skew models are transactional models, which explain the distribution of reproduction within animal societies as the result of reproductive payments exchanged among group members with differential leverage, and tug-of-war models, in which the reproductive shares are determined by costly 'tugs-of-war'. These two models have recently been synthesized to yield the mutual-pay, bordered tug-of-war model. In this paper, we extend the latter, show its evolutionary stability, and demonstrate that the generalized model yields four sub-models, namely the mutual-pay, alpha-pay, beta-pay, and pure tug-of-war. The alpha-pay sub-model turns out to closely resemble the original "concessions" transactional skew model, and the beta-pay sub-model turns out to have properties similar to the "restraint" transactional skew model. Thus, the general model unifies the four major models of reproductive skew and is rich in its predictions, as each sub-model exhibits different qualitative and quantitative relationships between reproductive skew or intra-group conflict and the ecological and genetic factors that determine skew and conflict. The conditions favoring transitions among these sub-models also are precisely predicted by the general model. The general model accommodates data from acorn woodpeckers and primitively eusocial bees potentially can account for many of the highly varied empirical findings on reproductive skew. We suggest further research that focuses on (1) determining which model is suitable for certain species and (2) understanding why and how various social animals resolve their breeding conflict by different conflict resolution mechanisms.

Group provisioning limits sharing conflict among nestlings in joint-nesting Taiwan yuhinas.

Offspring often compete over limited available resources. Such sibling competition may be detrimental to parents both because it entails wasted expenditure and because it allows stronger offspring to obtain a disproportionate share of resources. We studied nestling conflict over food and its resolution in a joint-nesting species of bird, the Taiwan yuhina (Yuhina brunneiceps). We show that adult yuhinas coordinate their feeding visits, and that this coordination limits competition among nestlings, leading to a 'fairer' division of resources. Transponder identification and video-recording systems were used to observe adult feeding and nestling begging behaviours. We found that: (i) yuhinas feed nestlings more often in large parties than in small parties; (ii) feeding events occurred non-randomly in bouts of very short intervals; and (iii) food distribution among nestlings was more evenly distributed, and fewer nestlings begged, during large-party feeding bouts compared with small-party feeding bouts. To our knowledge, this is the first study in a cooperative breeding species showing that adults can influence food allocation and competition among nestlings by coordinating their feeding visits. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the monopolizability of food affects the intensity of sibling competition, and highlight the importance of understanding the temporal strategies of food delivery.

Life histories determine divergent population trends for fishes under climate warming.

Most marine fish species express life-history changes across temperature gradients, such as faster growth, earlier maturation, and higher mortality at higher temperature. However, such climate-driven effects on life histories and population dynamics remain unassessed for most fishes. For 332 Indo-Pacific fishes, we show positive effects of temperature on body growth (but with decreasing asymptotic length), reproductive rates (including earlier age-at-maturation), and natural mortality for all species, with the effect strength varying among habitat-related species groups. Reef and demersal fishes are more sensitive to temperature changes than pelagic and bathydemersal fishes. Using a life table, we show that the combined changes of life histories upon increasing temperature tend to facilitate population growth for slow life-history populations, but reduce it for fast life-history ones. Within our data, lower proportions (25-30%) of slow life-history fishes but greater proportions of fast life-history fishes (42-60%) show declined population growth rates under 1 °C warming. Together, these findings suggest prioritizing sustainable management for fast life-history species.

Complex signals alter recognition accuracy and conspecific acceptance thresholds.

Many aspects of behaviour depend on recognition, but accurate recognition is difficult because the traits used for recognition often overlap. For example, brood parasitic birds mimic host eggs, so it is challenging for hosts to discriminate between their own eggs and parasitic eggs. Complex signals that occur in multiple sensory modalities or involve multiple signal components are thought to facilitate accurate recognition. However, we lack models that explore the effect of complex signals on the evolution of recognition systems. Here, we use individual-based models with a genetic algorithm to test how complex signals influence recognition thresholds, signaller phenotypes and receiver responses. The model has three main results. First, complex signals lead to more accurate recognition than simple signals. Second, when two signals provide different amounts of information, receivers will rely on the more informative signal to make recognition decisions and may ignore the less informative signal. As a result, the particular traits used for recognition change over evolutionary time as sender and receiver phenotypes evolve. Third, complex signals are more likely to evolve when recognition errors are high cost than when errors are low cost. Overall, redundant, complex signals are an evolutionarily stable mechanism to reduce recognition errors. This article is part of the theme issue 'Signal detection theory in recognition systems: from evolving models to experimental tests'.