Niche construction in a bioelectrochemical system with 3D-electrodes for efficient and thorough biodechlorination.

The design of bioelectrochemical system based on the principle of niche construction, offers a prospective pathway for achieving efficient and thorough biodechlorination in groundwater. This study designed a single-chamber microbial electrolysis cell, with porous three-dimensional (3D) electrodes introduced, to accelerate the niche construction process of functional communities. This approach allowed the growth of various bacteria capable of simultaneously degrading 2,4-dichlorophenol (DCP) and its refractory intermediates, 4-chlorophenol (4CP). The 3D-electrodes provided abundant attachment sites for diverse microbes with a high initial Shannon index (3.4), and along the degradation progress, functional bacteria (Hydrogenoanaerobacterium and Rhodococcus erythropolis for DCP-degrading, Sphingobacterium hotanense for 4CP-degrading and Delftia tsuruhatensis for phenol-degrading) constructed their niches. Applying an external voltage (0.6 V) further increased the selective pressure and niche construction pace, as well as provided 'micro-oxidation' site on the electrode surface, thereby achieving the degradation of 4CP and mineralization of phenol. The porous electrodes could also adsorb contaminants and narrow their interaction distance with microbes, which benefited the degradation efficiency. Thus a 10-fold increase in the overall mineralization of DCP was achieved. This study constructed a novel bioelectrochemical system for achieving efficient and thorough biodechlorination, which was suitable for in situ bioremediation of groundwater.

The self-in-the-world map emerged in the primate brain as a basis for Homo sapiens abilities.

The brain in the genus Homo expanded rapidly during evolution, accelerated by a reciprocated interaction between neural, cognitive, and ecological niches (triadic niche construction, or TNC). This biologically costly expansion incubated latent cognitive capabilities that, with a quick and inexpensive rewiring of brain areas in a second phase of TNC, provided the basis for Homo sapiens specific abilities. The neural demands for perception of the human body in interaction with tools and the environment required highly integrated sensorimotor domains, inducing the parietal lobe expansion seen in humans. These newly expanded brain areas allowed connecting the sensations felt in the body to the actions in the world through the cognitive function of "projection". In this opinion article, we suggest that as a relationship of equivalence between body parts, tools and their external effects was established, mental mechanisms of self-objectification might have emerged as described previously, grounding notions of spatial organization, idealized objects, and their transformations, as well as socio-emotional states in the sensing agent through a self-in-the-world map. Therefore, human intelligence and its features such as symbolic thought, language, mentalizing, and complex technical and social behaviors could have stemmed from the explicit awareness of the causal relationship between the self and intentional modifications to the environment.

Play in Cognitive Development: From Rational Constructivism to Predictive Processing.

It is widely believed that play and curiosity are key ingredients as children develop models of the world. There is also an emerging consensus that children are Bayesian learners who combine their structured prior beliefs with estimations of the likelihood of new evidence to infer the most probable model of the world. An influential school of thought within developmental psychology, rational constructivism, combines these two ideas to propose that children learn intuitive theories of how the world works in part by engaging in play activities that allow them to gather new information for testing their theories. There are still, however, at least two pieces missing from rational constructivist theories of development. First, rational constructivism has so far devoted little attention to explaining why children's preferred form of learning, play, feels so fun, enjoyable, and rewarding. Rational constructivism may suggest that children are curious and like to play because reducing uncertainty and learning better theories of the causal workings of the world is enjoyable. What remains unclear, however, is why reducing uncertainty in play is interesting, fun, and joyful, while doing so in other forms of learning can be frustrating or boring. Second, rational constructivism may have overlooked how children, during play, will take control of and manipulate their environment, sometimes in an effort to create ideal niches for surprise-extraction, sometimes for developing strategies for making the world fit with their predictions. These missing elements from rational constructivism can be provided by understanding the contribution of play to development in terms of predictive processing, an influential framework in cognitive neuroscience that models many of the brain's cognitive functions as processes of model-based, probabilistic prediction.

The biogeochemical boomerang: Site fidelity creates nutritional hotspots that may promote recurrent calving site reuse.

Animals interact with nutrient cycles by consuming and depositing nutrients, interactions studied separately in nutritional ecology and zoogeochemistry. Recent theoretical work bridges these disciplines, highlighting that animal-driven nutrient recycling could be crucial in helping animals meet their nutritional needs. When animals exhibit site fidelity, they consistently deposit nutrients, potentially improving vegetation quality. We investigated this potential feedback by analysing changes in forage nitrogen stocks following simulated caribou calving. We found that forage nitrogen stocks increased after 2 weeks and remained elevated after 1 year, a change due to increased forage quality, not quantity. We also developed a nutrient budget within calving grounds, demonstrating that natal fluid and calf carcasses contribute substantial nitrogen subsidies. We, thus, highlight a positive zoogeochemical feedback whereby nutrients deposited during calving become bioavailable during lactation and provide evidence that site fidelity creates a biogeochemical boomerang in which animals deposit nutrients that can be reused later.

Learning from disability studies to introduce the role of the individual to naturalistic accounts of disease.

Disability studies have been successfully focusing on individuals' lived experiences, the personalization of goals, and the constitution of the individual in defining disease and restructuring public understandings of disability. Although they had a strong influence in the policy making and medical modeling of disease, their framework has not been translated to traditional naturalistic accounts of disease. I will argue that, using new developments in evolutionary biology (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis [EES] about questions of proper function) and behavioral ecology (Niche conformance and construction about the questions of reference classes in biostatistics accounts), the main elements of the framework of disability studies can be used to represent life histories at the conceptual level of the two main "non-normative" accounts of disease. I chose these accounts since they are related to medicine in a more descriptive way. The success of the practical aspects of disability studies this way will be communicated without causing injustice to the individual since they will represent the individuality of the patient in two main naturalistic accounts of disease: the biostatistical account and the evolutionary functional account. Although most accounts criticizing the concept of disease as value-laden do not supply a positive element, disability studies can supply a good point for descriptive extension of the concept through inclusion of epistemic agency.

The interplay of facilitation and competition drives the emergence of multistability in dryland plant communities.

Within communities, species are wrapped in a set of feedbacks with each other and with their environment. When such feedbacks are strong enough they can generate alternative stable states. So far, research on alternative stable states has mostly focused on systems with a small number of species and a limited diversity of interaction types. Here, we analyze a spatial model of plant community dynamics in stressed ecosystems such as drylands, where each species is characterized by a strategy, and the different species interact through facilitation and competition for space and resources, such as water. We identify three different types of multistability emerging from the interplay of competition and facilitation. Under low-stress levels, plant communities organize in small groups of coexisting species, maintained by space, competition and facilitation ("cliques"). Under higher stress levels, positive feedback from facilitation lead to the dominance of a single facilitating species ("mutual exclusion states"). At the highest stress levels, the single facilitating species left in the system coexists with the desert state. By linking community ecology and alternative stable states theory using a spatial plant community model for stressed ecosystems, our study contributes to highlight the importance of positive feedback loops for the stability of ecological communities.

Co-cultures: exploring interspecies culture among humans and other animals.

The concept of 'co-culture' is introduced as a novel framework for understanding the mutual cultural evolution between animal species, including, but not only, humans. It explores the dynamics of interspecies interactions, particularly in how different species influence each other's behavioural and cognitive adaptations. Various instances of interspecies cultural exchange are highlighted, such as the acquisition of medicinal plants from animals resulting in a shared medicinal culture, adaptive behaviours of urban wildlife, and cooperative behaviours between animal species. Co-culture challenges the notion of species-specific culture, underscoring the complexity and interconnectedness of human and animal societies, and between animal societies. Further research into co-culture is advocating and emphasising its implications for conservation, urban planning, and a deeper understanding of animal cognition and behaviour.

Can plants build their niche through modulation of soil microbial activities linked with nitrogen cycling? A test with Arabidopsis thaliana.

In natural systems, different plant species have been shown to modulate specific nitrogen (N) cycling processes so as to meet their N demand, thereby potentially influencing their own niche. This phenomenon might go beyond plant interactions with symbiotic microorganisms and affect the much less explored plant interactions with free-living microorganisms involved in soil N cycling, such as nitrifiers and denitrifiers. Here, we investigated variability in the modulation of soil nitrifying and denitrifying enzyme activities (NEA and DEA, respectively), and their ratio (NEA : DEA), across 193 Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. We studied the genetic and environmental determinants of such plant-soil interactions, and effects on plant biomass production in the next generation. We found that NEA, DEA, and NEA : DEA varied c. 30-, 15- and 60-fold, respectively, among A. thaliana genotypes and were related to genes linked with stress response, flowering, and nitrate nutrition, as well as to soil parameters at the geographic origin of the analysed genotypes. Moreover, plant-mediated N cycling activities correlated with the aboveground biomass of next-generation plants in home vs away nonautoclaved soil, suggesting a transgenerational impact of soil biotic conditioning on plant performance. Altogether, these findings suggest that nutrient-based plant niche construction may be much more widespread than previously thought.

Adapting food environment frameworks to recognize a wild-cultivated continuum.

Food environments, or interfaces between consumers and their food systems, are a useful lens for assessing global dietary change. Growing inclusivity of nature-dependent societies in lower-and middle-income countries is driving recent developments in food environment frameworks. Downs et al. (2020) propose a food environment typology that includes: wild, cultivated, informal and formal market environments, where wild and cultivated are "natural food environments." Drawing from transdisciplinary perspectives, this paper argues that wild and cultivated food environments are not dichotomous, but rather exist across diverse landscapes under varying levels of human management and alteration. The adapted typology is applied to a case study of Indigenous Pgaz K'Nyau food environments in San Din Daeng village, Thailand, using the Gallup Poll's Thailand-adapted Diet Quality Questionnaire with additional food source questions. Wild-cultivated food environments, as classified by local participants, were the source of more food items than any other type of food environment (37% of reported food items). The case of Indigenous Pgaz K'Nyau food environments demonstrates the importance of understanding natural food environments along a continuum from wild to cultivated.

Vertically inherited microbiota and environment modifying behaviours conceal genetic variation in dung beetle life history.

Diverse organisms actively manipulate their (sym)biotic and physical environment in ways that feed back on their own development. However, the degree to which these processes affect microevolution remains poorly understood. The gazelle dung beetle both physically modifies its ontogenetic environment and structures its biotic interactions through vertical symbiont transmission. By experimentally eliminating (i) physical environmental modifications and (ii) the vertical inheritance of microbes, we assess how environment modifying behaviour and microbiome transmission shape heritable variation and evolutionary potential. We found that depriving larvae of symbionts and environment modifying behaviours increased additive genetic variance and heritability for development time but not body size. This suggests that larvae's ability to manipulate their environment has the potential to modify heritable variation and to facilitate the accumulation of cryptic genetic variation. This cryptic variation may become released and selectable when organisms encounter environments that are less amenable to organismal manipulation or restructuring. Our findings also suggest that intact microbiomes, which are commonly thought to increase genetic variation of their hosts, may instead reduce and conceal heritable variation. More broadly, our findings highlight that the ability of organisms to actively manipulate their environment may affect the potential of populations to evolve when encountering novel, stressful conditions.

Individualized social niches in animals: Theoretical clarifications and processes of niche change.

What are social niches, and how do they arise and change? Our first goal in the present article is to clarify the concept of an individualized social niche and to distinguish it from related concepts, such as a social environment and a social role. We argue that focal individuals are integral parts of individualized social niches and that social interactions with conspecifics are further core elements of social niches. Our second goal in the present article is to characterize three types of processes-social niche construction, conformance, and choice (social NC3 processes)-that explain how individualized social niches originate and change. Our approach brings together studies of behavior, ecology, and evolution and integrates social niches into the broader concept of an individualized ecological niche. We show how clarifying the concept of a social niche and recognizing the differences between the three social NC3 processes enhance and stimulate empirical research.

Human behaviors driving disease emergence.

Interactions between humans, animals, and the environment facilitate zoonotic spillover-the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans. Narratives that cast modern humans as exogenous and disruptive forces that encroach upon "natural" disease systems limit our understanding of human drivers of disease. This review leverages theory from evolutionary anthropology that situates humans as functional components of disease ecologies, to argue that human adaptive strategies to resource acquisition shape predictable patterns of high-risk human-animal interactions, (2) humans construct ecological processes that facilitate spillover, and (3) contemporary patterns of epidemiological risk are emergent properties of interactions between human foraging ecology and niche construction. In turn, disease ecology serves as an important vehicle to link what some cast as opposing bodies of theory in human ecology. Disease control measures should consider human drivers of disease as rational, adaptive, and dynamic and capitalize on our capacity to influence ecological processes to mitigate risk.

Uncovering the Holocene roots of contemporary disease-scapes: bringing archaeology into One Health.

The accelerating pace of emerging zoonotic diseases in the twenty-first century has motivated cross-disciplinary collaboration on One Health approaches, combining microbiology, veterinary and environmental sciences, and epidemiology for outbreak prevention and mitigation. Such outbreaks are often caused by spillovers attributed to human activities that encroach on wildlife habitats and ecosystems, such as land use change, industrialized food production, urbanization and animal trade. While the origin of anthropogenic effects on animal ecology and biogeography can be traced to the Late Pleistocene, the archaeological record-a long-term archive of human-animal-environmental interactions-has largely been untapped in these One Health approaches, thus limiting our understanding of these dynamics over time. In this review, we examine how humans, as niche constructors, have facilitated new host species and 'disease-scapes' from the Late Pleistocene to the Anthropocene, by viewing zooarchaeological, bioarchaeological and palaeoecological data with a One Health perspective. We also highlight how new biomolecular tools and advances in the '-omics' can be holistically coupled with archaeological and palaeoecological reconstructions in the service of studying zoonotic disease emergence and re-emergence.

Partisan niche construction: Out-party affect, geographic sorting, and mate selection.

Partisans in the American electorate are affectively polarized, which coincides with the tendency for partisan geographic sorting. Could mate selection pressures contribute to this geographic tendency, and how might they interact with out-party affect? I propose a model in which an individual's perception of their mate success in a niche is key. I argue that perceived mate success is a function of a niche's partisanship and one's out-party affect, which in turn, incentivizes sorting. The model is partially tested with conjoint experiments on multiple U.S. samples. Results show that partisans perceive a lower probability of mate success in niches with greater shares of out-partisans and that mate success interacts with negative out-party affect. I also replicate findings on political mate choice preferences with a more appropriate method. Lastly, this project links instrumentality and affect, which is a departure from past work. In doing so, it contributes to research on the consequences of mate pressures for political behavior.

Climate change and long-term human behaviour in the Neotropics: an archaeological view from the Global South.

In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of archaeology in discussions about how humans have contributed to and dealt with climate change, especially in the long term. We suggest Niche Construction Theory as a suitable framework to that end. In order to take into account both human and environmental variability, we also advocate for a situated perspective that includes the Global South as a source of knowledge production, and the Neotropics as a relevant case study to consider. To illustrate this, we review the mid-Holocene Hypsithermal period in the southern Puna and continental Patagonia, both in southern South America, by assessing the challenges posed by this climate period and the archaeological signatures of the time from a Niche Construction Theory perspective. Finally, we emphasize the importance of these considerations for policymaking. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Climate change adaptation and the back of the invisible hand.

A good deal of contemporary work in cultural evolutionary theory focuses on the adaptive significance of culture. In this paper, we make the case that scientifically accurate and politically feasible responses to the climate crisis require a complex understanding of human cultural practices of niche construction that moves beyond the adaptive significance of culture. We develop this thesis in two related ways. First, we argue that cumulative cultural practices of niche construction can generate stable equilibria and runaway selection processes that result in long-term existential risks within and across cultural groups. We dub this the back of the invisible hand. Second, we argue that the ability of cultural groups to innovate technological solutions to environmental problems is highly constrained in ways that are exacerbated by sustained intergroup conflict, inequality and by inherently unpredictable cascades in climate change and human migration patterns. After developing these theoretical points about human cultural practices of niche construction in detail, we conclude our discussion with some tentative practical suggestions about the way that cultural evolutionary history can more fruitfully be used in efforts to remit the climate crisis and contribute to sustainable practices of human climate change adaptation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Lifespan Development Seen through Niche Construction Theory.

I will here pick up on a suggestion made by Greve (2023) in this journal, namely that a proper understanding of lifespan development means defending a non-reductionist psychology taking biological processes seriously, but without reducing psychology to physiology. I will here suggest and argue for the use of niche construction theory as a way of providing a psychological theoretical perspective on lifespan development broad enough to contain both naturalistic and normative elements in a non-reductionist manner.

The molding of intraspecific trait variation by selection under ecological inheritance.

Organisms continuously modify their environment, often impacting the fitness of future conspecifics due to ecological inheritance. When this inheritance is biased toward kin, selection favors modifications that increase the fitness of downstream individuals. How such selection shapes trait variation within populations remains poorly understood. Using mathematical modelling, we investigate the coevolution of multiple traits in a group-structured population when these traits affect the group environment, which is then bequeathed to future generations. We examine when such coevolution favors polymorphism as well as the resulting associations among traits. We find in particular that two traits become associated when one trait affects the environment while the other influences the likelihood that future kin experience this environment. To illustrate this, we model the coevolution of (a) the attack rate on a local renewable resource, which deteriorates environmental conditions, with (b) dispersal between groups, which reduces the likelihood that kin suffers from such deterioration. We show this often leads to the emergence of two highly differentiated morphs: one that readily disperses and depletes local resources, and another that maintains these resources and tends to remain philopatric. More broadly, we suggest that ecological inheritance can contribute to phenotypic diversity and lead to complex polymorphism.

Microbial redox cycling enhances ecosystem thermodynamic efficiency and productivity.

Microbial life in low-energy ecosystems relies on individual energy conservation, optimizing energy use in response to interspecific competition and mutualistic interspecific syntrophy. Our study proposes a novel community-level strategy for increasing energy use efficiency. By utilizing an oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction network model that represents microbial redox metabolic interactions, we investigated multiple species-level competition and cooperation within the network. Our results suggest that microbial functional diversity allows for metabolic handoffs, which in turn leads to increased energy use efficiency. Furthermore, the mutualistic division of labour and the resulting complexity of redox pathways actively drive material cycling, further promoting energy exploitation. Our findings reveal the potential of self-organized ecological interactions to develop efficient energy utilization strategies, with important implications for microbial ecosystem functioning and the co-evolution of life and Earth.