News & Views

A high-throughput laboratory experiment tracking the assembly of soil-derived communities shows that species-rich bacterial necromass supports increasingly diverse communities, with each additional dead species expanding opportunities for niche partitioning.

A clade-wide study of non-human primates shows that same-sex sexual behaviour typically appears in long-lived, sexually dimorphic species with complex social structures that experience predation, resource scarcity or environmental challenge.

New studies that document the effect of polymetallic nodule mining vehicles on deep-sea biodiversity suggest that keeping up with technological innovations will be key to more realistic impact assessments of deep-sea mining.

Zooming in at fine spatial scales reveals that pathogens spread through close contact can produce striking variation in infection rates among groups of host animals just metres apart, which drives hidden epidemics and population collapse.

A high-resolution map of plant sodium concentrations across sub-Saharan Africa reveals that the distribution of large mammalian herbivores aligns with a diet of modest salt intake, with higher herbivore densities in habitats with intermediate concentrations of foliar sodium.

A powerful technique for probing the effects of amino acid substitutions on protein function sheds light on the evolutionary constraints of a rapidly evolving influenza virus glycoprotein.

Population genetics simulations and experimental evolution in yeast reconcile the apparent contradiction between high levels of beneficial mutations observed in the laboratory and long-term evolutionary patterns that mimic neutrality.

Pressures such as pollution, climate change and altered flows threaten streams and rivers worldwide. A global meta-analysis reveals how these key stressors shape riverine biodiversity, and offers valuable insights for freshwater management.

Transcriptional and functional analyses reveal a taxon-specific promoter at the Antennapedia gene that is responsible for seasonal plasticity in butterfly eyespots.

A diversification model that integrates phylogenetic and fossil occurrence data reveals diversity-independent and non-adaptively radiating dynamics that govern the rise and fall of plant and animal clades

A quasi-experimental evaluation of the world’s largest agroecology programme finds that microbe-enhancing farming practices generate equivalent yields and higher profits than chemical-based farming, while also better supporting functionally diverse bird communities.

New experimental evidence suggests that cichlids in Lake Tanganyika exhibit diverse activity patterns, and these differences are associated with variation in unexpected genetic loci.

A longitudinal observational study in a wild meerkat population investigates the pattern of pathogen-mediated selection and provides evidence of an arms race between immune genes and pathogens.

A decade after a marine epidemic killed off sea stars and triggered ecosystem-wide effects along the Pacific Coast of North America, researchers have identified the bacterial pathogen that is responsible for sea star wasting disease.

Convolutional neural networks and genetic association analysis decode the evolution of colour pattern diversity and its underlying complex genetic architecture in the Trinidadian guppy.

A theoretical approach quantifies the drivers of community variability in simulated and natural plant communities, which sheds light on the mechanisms that underlie biodiversity–ecosystem stability relationships.

Analysis of land–atmosphere water and CO₂ fluxes suggests that reduced water use by vegetation, rather than increased carbon uptake, is the driving factor behind the well-documented increase in vegetation water-use efficiency in response to rising atmospheric CO₂.

Genomic and phenotypic analysis of a global invasive plant pinpoints large-effect haplotype blocks involved in parallel local adaptation and invasion success across continents, underscoring a contribution of putative structural variants to rapid evolution.

Mycobacterium lepromatosis genomes associated with 4,000-year-old human skeletons in Chile establish an American origin for this causal agent of leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease), and point to different evolutionary trajectories and transmission pathways for M. lepromatosis and its sister pathogen Mycobacterium leprae.

Single-cell analysis of placental transcriptomes across species reveals the evolutionary divergence and crosstalk of maternal and fetal cell types during early mammalian evolution.