Migratory birds are inherently vagile, a strategy that may reduce the impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation on genetic diversity. However, specialist resource requirements and range‐edge distribution can counteract these benefits. The European nightjar ( Caprimulgus europaeus ) is a long‐distance migratory bird and resource specialist. Like other long‐distance migrants, nightjar populations have declined across the British...

Due to the ever-increasing rise of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria, the development of alternative antimicrobial agents is a global priority. The antimicrobial activity of ionic gold was explored against four Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains with different AMR profiles in order to determine the antimicrobial activity of ionic gold and elucidate the mechanisms of action. Disc diffusion assays (zone of inhibition: ZoI) coup...

Social interactions are rarely random. In some instances, animals exhibit homophily or heterophily, the tendency to interact with similar or dissimilar conspecifics, respectively. Genetic homophily and heterophily influence the evolutionary dynamics of populations, because they potentially affect sexual and social selection. Here, we investigate the link between social interactions and allele frequencies in foraging flocks of...

Identifying the genes underlying phenotypic variation in natural populations can provide novel insight into the evolutionary process. The candidate gene approach has been applied to studies of a number of traits in various species, in an attempt to elucidate their genetic basis. Here, we test the application of the candidate gene approach to identify the loci involved in variation in gastrointestinal parasite burden, a complex...

Understanding the maintenance of genetic variation in natural populations is a core aim of evolutionary genetics. Insight can be gained by quantifying selection at the level of the genotype, as opposed to the phenotype. Here, we show that in a natural population of Soay sheep which is polymorphic for coat pattern, recessive genetic variants at the causal gene, agouti signalling protein ( ASIP ) are associated with reduced life...

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...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a widely employed molecular tool in phylogeography, in the inference of human evolutionary history, in dating the domestication of livestock and in forensic science. In humans and other vertebrates the popularity of mtDNA can be partially attributed to an assumption of strict maternal inheritance, such that there is no recombination between mitochondrial lineages. The recent demonstration that link...

Paternity inference using highly polymorphic codominant markers is becoming common in the study of natural populations. However, multiple males are often found to be genetically compatible with each offspring tested, even when the probability of excluding an unrelated male is high. While various methods exist for evaluating the likelihood of paternity of each nonexcluded male, interpreting these likelihoods has hitherto been d...