Identifying the environmental drivers of variation in fitness‐related traits is a central objective in ecology and evolutionary biology. Temporal fluctuations of these environmental drivers are often synchronized at large spatial scales. Yet, whether synchronous environmental conditions can generate spatial synchrony in fitness‐related trait values (i.e., correlated temporal trait fluctuations across populations) is poorly und...

Aim Physiological tolerances and biotic interactions along habitat gradients are thought to influence species occurrence. Distributional differences caused by such forces are particularly noticeable on tropical mountains, where high species turnover along elevational gradients occurs over relatively short distances and elevational distributions of particular species can shift among mountains. Such shifts are interpreted as evi...

Social environments have an important effect on a range of ecological processes, and form a crucial component of selection. However, little is known of the link between personality, social behaviour and population structure. We combine a well‐understood personality trait with large‐scale social networks in wild songbirds, and show that personality underpins multiple aspects of social organisation. First, we demonstrate a relat...

Aim (1) To describe the species–area relationships among communities of Plasmodium and Haemoproteus parasites in different island populations of the same host genus (Aves: Zosterops ). (2) To compare distance–decay relationships (turnover) between parasite communities and those with potential avian and dipteran hosts, which differ with respect to their movement and potential to disperse parasite species over large distances. L...

The ease of obtaining genotypic data from wild populations has renewed interest in the relationship between individual genetic diversity and fitness‐related traits (heterozygosity–fitness correlations, or HFC). Here we present a comprehensive meta‐analysis of HFC studies using powerful multivariate techniques which account for nonindependence of data. We compare these findings with those from univariate techniques, and test th...

The degree to which haematozoan parasites can exploit a range of vectors and hosts has both ecological and evolutionary implications for their transmission and biogeography. Here we explore the extent to which closely related mosquito species share the same or closely related haematozoan parasites, and examine the overlap in parasite lineages with those isolated from avian hosts, Zosterops species, sampled across the same stud...

Comparative analyses of survival senescence by using life tables have identified generalizations including the observation that mammals senesce faster than similar‐sized birds. These generalizations have been challenged because of limitations of life‐table approaches and the growing appreciation that senescence is more than an increasing probability of death. Without using life tables, we examine senescence rates in annual ind...

Global warming has had numerous effects on populations of animals and plants, with many species in temperate regions experiencing environmental change at unprecedented rates. Populations with low potential for adaptive evolutionary change and plasticity will have little chance of persistence in the face of environmental change. Assessment of the potential for adaptive evolution requires the estimation of quantitative genetic p...

Natural selection may act in different directions during different life‐history stages, or in different directions on different classes of individuals. Antagonistic selection of this kind may be an important mechanism by which additive genetic variation for quantitative traits is maintained, and can prevent populations or species reaching local adaptive peaks. This paper reports the results of a study of viability selection on...