Michael S. Singer results 31
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Plants can ‘cry for help’ in response to herbivory as well as anticipate herbivory by detecting specific environmental cues before damage occurs. But can plants ‘anticipate help?’ Building on the optimal defence and information transfer models of induced plant defence, we argue they can. We find literature support for key assumptions of the ‘anticipating help’ hypothesis, which proposes plants can (1) detect cues that signal r...
Aim The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage to gauge its potential as a global research and monitoring tool. To address this...
Parasitoid avoidance of intraguild predation drives enemy complementarity in a multi‐trophic ecological networkNARA Subscribed
How consumer diversity determines consumption efficiency is a central issue in ecology. In the context of predation and biological control, this relationship concerns predator diversity and predation efficiency. Reduced predation efficiency can result from different predator taxa eating each other in addition to their common prey (interference due to intraguild predation). By contrast, multiple predator taxa with overlapping b...
Epigenetic clocks based on patterns of DNA methylation have great importance in understanding aging and disease; however, there are basic questions to be resolved in their application. It remains unknown whether epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) within an individual shows strong correlation between different primary tissue sites, the extent to which tissue pathology and clinical illness correlate with EAA in the target organ,...
Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and...
Interactions between ants and phloem‐feeding herbivores are characterised as a keystone mutualism because they restructure arthropod communities and generate trophic cascades. Keystone interactions in terrestrial food webs are hypothesised to depend on herbivore community structure and bottom‐up effects on plant growth. Here, we tested this prediction at a landscape scale with a long‐term ant‐exclusion experiment on hickory sa...
Multiple interaction types determine the impact of ant predation of caterpillars in a forest communityNARA Subscribed
Direct and indirect effects of predators are highly variable in complex communities, and understanding the sources of this variation is a research priority in community ecology. Recent evidence indicates that herbivore community structure is a primary determinant of predation strength and its cascading impacts on plants. In this study, we use variation in herbivore community structure among plant species to experimentally test...
Host‐associated genomic differentiation in congeneric butterflies: now you see it, now you do notNARA Subscribed
Ecotypic variation among populations may become associated with widespread genomic differentiation, but theory predicts that this should happen only under particular conditions of gene flow, selection and population size. In closely related species, we might expect the strength of host‐associated genomic differentiation ( HAD ) to be correlated with the degree of phenotypic differentiation in host‐adaptive traits. Using micros...
There is increasing pressure from policymakers for ecologists to generate more detailed ‘attribution’ analyses aimed at quantitatively estimating relative contributions of different driving forces, including anthropogenic climate change ( ACC ), to observed biological changes. Here, we argue that this approach is not productive for ecological studies. Global meta‐analyses of diverse species, regions and ecosystems have already...
Geographic mosaics of species' association: a definition and an example driven by plant–insect phenological synchronyNARA Subscribed
Spatial mosaics occur in both evolutionary and ecological properties of species' interactions. Studies of these patterns have facilitated description and prediction of evolutionary responses of interacting species to each other and to changing environments. We propose seeking complementary understanding of community assembly and dynamics by studying ecological and mechanistic properties of mosaics. We define “species' associat...
A conceptual divide exists between ecological and evolutionary approaches to understanding adaptive radiation, although the phenomenon is inherently both ecological and evolutionary. This divide is evident in studies of phytophagous insects, a highly diverse group that has been frequently investigated with the implicit or explicit goal of understanding its diversity. Whereas ecological studies of phytophagous insects increasin...