Aim Species are often expected to track climate change via changes in their abundances and distributions. This climate tracking hypothesis generates the prediction that warming temperatures should cause species to show population increases at their poleward range limits and population decreases at their equatorward range limits. We tested these predictions for 516 species of North and Central American birds. Location North and...

Endotherms vary widely in their capacity to defend sublethal body temperature ( T b ) during acute heat exposure. Interspecific variation in the upper thermal limits of small mammals remains poorly studied, particularly in taxa other than bats. We hypothesised that rupicolous elephant shrews (Macroscelidae), on account of their occupancy of above-ground rock crevices in hot habitats and rapid cursorial locomotion, have evolved...

The evolution of animals and their gut symbionts is a complex phenomenon, obscured by lability and diversity. In social organisms, transmission of symbionts among relatives may yield systems with more stable associations. Here, we study the history of a social insect symbiosis involving cephalotine ants and their extracellular gut bacteria, which come predominantly from host‐specialized lineages. We perform multi‐locus phyloge...

The hypothesis that species' ranges are limited by interspecific competition has motivated decades of debate, but a general answer remains elusive. Here we test this hypothesis for lowland tropical birds by examining species' precipitation niche breadths. We focus on precipitation because it—not temperature—is the dominant climate variable that shapes the biota of the lowland tropics. We used 3.6 million fine‐scale citizen sci...

The role of atmospheric humidity in the evolution of endotherms' thermoregulatory performance remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that elevated humidity is known to impede evaporative cooling capacity. Using a phylogenetically informed comparative framework, we tested the hypothesis that pronounced hyperthermia tolerance among birds occupying humid lowlands evolved to reduce the impact of humidity‐impeded scope for ev...

Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of unknown etiology characterized by widespread aggregation of the protein alpha-synuclein in neurons and glia. Its orphan status, biological relationship to Parkinson’s disease (PD), and rapid progression have sparked interest in drug development. One significant obstacle to therapeutics is disease heterogeneity. Here, we share our process of developing a clin...