Stephens, Patrick R Wiens, John J
Published in
The American naturalist
Studies that have explored the origins of patterns of community structure from a phylogenetic perspective have generally found either convergence (similarity) in community structure between regions through adaptive evolution or lack of convergence (dissimilarity) due to phylogenetic conservatism in the divergent ecological characteristics of lineag...
Holt, Robert D
Published in
The American naturalist
We examine the impact of temporal variation on adaptive evolution in "sink" environments, where a species encounters conditions outside its niche. Sink populations persist because of recurrent immigration from sources. Prior studies have highlighted the importance of demographic constraints on adaptive evolution in sinks and revealed that adaptatio...
Singer, Michael S Carrière, Yves Theuring, Claudine Hartmann, Thomas
Published in
The American naturalist
The relative importance of food quality and enemy-reduced space is a central but unresolved issue in the evolutionary ecology of host use by phytophagous insects. Indeed, a practical obstacle to experimentally disentangling the functional roles of these factors is the host specificity of insect herbivores, particularly toxic plant specialists. In t...
Goymann, Wolfgang Moore, Ignacio T Scheuerlein, Alexander Hirschenhauser, Katharina Grafen, Alan Wingfield, John C
Published in
The American naturalist
Previous investigations suggest that male tropical birds have lower plasma testosterone concentrations than northern latitude species. To test whether this generalization is valid, we analyzed all currently available plasma testosterone data of tropical birds. We focused on peak breeding testosterone levels using phylogenetic and conventional stati...
Klvana, Ilya Berteaux, Dominique Cazelles, Bernard
Published in
The American naturalist
Using North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) feeding scars on trees as an index of past porcupine abundance, we have found that porcupine populations have fluctuated regularly over the past 130 years in the Bas St. Laurent region of eastern Quebec, with superimposed periodicities of 11 and 22 years. Coherency and phase analyses showed that t...
Sinclair, Elizabeth A Bezy, Robert L Bolles, Kathryn Camarillo, Jose L Crandall, Keith A Sites, Jack W Jr
Published in
The American naturalist
Identification of species in natural populations has recently received increased attention with a number of investigators proposing rigorous methods for species delimitation. Morphologically conservative species (or species complexes) with deep phylogenetic histories (and limited gene flow) are likely to pose particular problems when attempting to ...
Langerhans, R Brian DeWitt, Thomas J
Published in
The American naturalist
A fundamental question in evolutionary biology asks whether organisms experiencing similar selective pressures will evolve similar solutions or whether historical contingencies dominate the evolutionary process and yield disparate evolutionary outcomes. It is perhaps most likely that both shared selective forces as well as unique histories play key...
McCleery, R H Pettifor, R A Armbruster, P Meyer, K Sheldon, B C Perrins, C M
Published in
The American naturalist
Traits that are closely associated with fitness tend to have lower heritabilities (h2) than those that are not. This has been interpreted as evidence that natural selection tends to deplete genetic variation more rapidly for traits more closely associated with fitness (a corollary of Fisher's fundamental theorem), but Price and Schluter (1991) sugg...
Levine, Jonathan M Rees, Mark
Published in
The American naturalist
Traditional conservation biology regards environmental fluctuations as detrimental to persistence, reducing long-term average growth rates and increasing the probability of extinction. By contrast, coexistence models from community ecology suggest that for species with dormancy, environmental fluctuations may be essential for persistence in competi...
Reuter, Max Helms, Ken R Lehmann, Laurent Keller, Laurent
Published in
The American naturalist
In eusocial Hymenoptera, queens and workers are in conflict over optimal sex allocation. Sex ratio theory, while generating predictions on the extent of this conflict under a wide range of conditions, has largely neglected the fact that worker control of investment almost certainly requires the manipulation of brood sex ratio. This manipulation is ...
