Biodiversity can buffer ecosystem functioning against disturbances by allowing species to compensate for the functions lost through the extirpation of other species, a key process known as ecological insurance. Functional ecology has extended this idea by emphasising trait redundancy amongst species that help buffer core ecosystem functions. However, some functions might be supported only by species with distinct combinations...

Marine Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) approaches are a well-established and fundamental component of international agreements and treaties, regional seas conventions, assessment strategies, European Directives and national and regional instruments. However, there is the need to interrogate and clarify the implementation of EBM approaches under current marine management. Although particular focus here is within the European U...

Recent work has shown that evaluating functional trait distinctiveness, the average trait distance of a species to other species in a community offers promising insights into biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem functioning. However, the ecological mechanisms underlying the emergence and persistence of functionally distinct species are poorly understood. Here, we address the issue by considering a heterogeneous fitness landscap...

Trait‐based ecology aims to understand the processes that generate the overarching diversity of organismal traits and their influence on ecosystem functioning. Achieving this goal requires simplifying this complexity in synthetic axes defining a trait space and to cluster species based on their traits while identifying those with unique combinations of traits. However, so far, we know little about the dimensionality, the robus...

Understanding the processes of adaptive divergence, which may ultimately lead to speciation, is a major question in evolutionary biology. Allochronic differentiation refers to a particular situation where gene flow is primarily impeded by temporal isolation between early and late reproducers. This process has been suggested to occur in a large array of organisms, even though it is still overlooked in the literature. We here fo...

Aim Lower species diversity, increased population densities and ecological niche enlargement are common characteristics of island faunas. However, it remains to be determined if they extend to the parasite community. We tested if Haemosporidia parasite pressure varies between islands and the mainland with two different levels of analysis: (1) at the host community level and (2) with paired‐species comparisons between islands a...

Studies focusing on geographical genetic patterns of commensal species and on human history complement each other and provide proxies to trace common colonization events. On Madagascar, the unintentional introduction and spread of the commensal species R attus rattus by people may have left a living clue of human colonization patterns and history. In this study, we addressed this question by characterizing the genetic structur...

Genome scans using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers became popular in nonmodel species within the last 10 years, but few studies have tried to characterize the anonymous outliers identified. This study follows on from an AFLP genome scan in the black rat ( Rattus rattus ), the reservoir of plague ( Yersinia pestis infection) in Madagascar. We successfully sequenced 17 of the 22 markers previously shown to...

Studies of both vertebrates and invertebrates have suggested that specialists, as compared to generalists, are likely to suffer more serious declines in response to environmental change. Less is known about the effects of environmental conditions on specialist versus generalist parasites. Here, we study the evolutionary strategies of malaria parasites ( Plasmodium spp.) among different bird host communities. We determined the...

The invasive ant species Wasmannia auropunctata displays both ecologically dominant and non‐dominant populations within its native range. Three factors could theoretically explain the ecological dominance of some native populations of W. auropunctata : (i) its clonal reproductive system, through demographic and/or adaptive advantages; (ii) its unicolonial social organization, through lower intraspecific and efficient interspec...

Using the same set of microsatellite markers, we compared the population genetic structure of two Mastomys species, one being exclusively commensal in southeastern Senegal, and the other being continuously distributed outside villages in this region. Both species were sampled in the same landscape context and at the same spatial scale. According to the expectations based on the degree of habitat patchiness (which is higher for...