Search the history of over 286 billion web pages on the Internet. Article Summaries - Functional Ecology. Lay Summaries. The summaries below are provided by our authors to help put their research into context for the wider scientific community and the general public. Lay summaries for the current issue are here. You can also find all the previous lay summaries by issue, as well as summaries for articles on Early View, in the lay summaries archive. You can also find all the previous lay summaries by issue, as well as summaries for articles on Early View, in the lay summaries archive. Rezende. Share this summary: Tweet. Does an idling Ferrari consume more fuel than a Volkswagen Beetle? A similar question applies to living organisms. Whether at rest or active, animals are constrained to operate within the energetic bounds determined by their minimum and maximum metabolic rates, which can differ considerably among individuals and species. The floor and ceiling of metabolic capacity in an animal may be mechanistically linked to each other if the former reflects the idling cost of the machinery needed to support the latter. A Ferrari, for example, needs a larger engine to attain a higher top speed than a Beetle, but this engine may cost more to run even when the car is not moving. In animals, increased muscle mass and other biochemical features that support high levels of activity may similarly increase resting costs. Here we conduct the first comprehensive assessment of the relationship between minimum and maximum metabolic rates across a diversity of vertebrate taxa (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals), analysing 1. We found a general positive association between minimum and maximum metabolic rate that is shared among all vertebrates, suggesting that Ferraris such as hummingbirds or cheetahs spend more fuel at rest than Beetles such as chickens or sloths. In other words, power can be costly. This finding has major implications for our understanding of how different lifestyles evolve: while it may be advantageous to be highly active to search for food or capture prey, there also seems to be a high price to pay while at rest. In fact, some researchers speculate that this cost- benefit relationship underlies the evolution of warm- blooded birds and mammals whose metabolism at rest is so high that they can produce enough heat to remain warm at cold temperatures. Our results suggest that minimum and maximum metabolic rates are functionally linked and evolve together, providing some support to this hypothesis. Image caption: Hummingbird feeding. Photo provided by authors. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. You can find the As Accepted version here. The amount of water transpired from the vegetation is an important factor of the water cycle, affecting, for example, local climate and the water resources available to neighbouring societies. Lianas (woody vines) are a peculiar yet important component of forests. They climb neighbouring trees to attain higher positions, and display their leaves in the forest canopy, yet their basal stems remain quite thin.
Lianas have a much greater amount of leaves relative to their basal stem area (BA, through which water flows), compared with trees. The top- heavy architecture implies that lianas possibly consume more water through transpiration than expected from their BA. Here, we evaluated the contribution of lianas to community- level canopy transpiration in a warm temperate forest stand, and discussed the potential importance of lianas to forest water dynamics. We measured the rates of water ascent in the stems (sap flux) for 1 year for four species each of lianas and trees using a thermal dissipation method (based on empirical relationships between the extent of heat dissipation from the sensor and the water- flow rates surrounding the sensor). Lianas showed an average of 2–4 times greater sap flux per unit stem area than trees throughout the year. By extrapolating the sap flux data to the inventory data of the study plot, we estimated that lianas contributed 1. BA. Our results indicate that the contribution of lianas to forest water dynamics may be several times greater than their contribution to forest BA. This implies that a slight increase of liana abundance might have considerable effects on water dynamics and, through competition with trees for limited water, the capacity of forests to store carbon. The enlargement of liana communities has already been observed across neotropical forests. This study underlines the necessity of evaluating the relative importance of lianas to forest water dynamics in forests worldwide. Image caption: A liana in the forest canopy. Photo by Ryuji Ichihashi. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. You can find the As Accepted version here. Nowadays, this disturbance constitutes a major threat to most water bodies because it causes direct changes in aquatic ecosystems, including excessive algal growth, health problems linked to the toxicity of the introduced pollutants (various forms of nutrients like nitrates and phosphates) and harmful algal blooms, as well as more complex and indirect changes, such as modifications of the food chain, loss of large plants, increased turbidity and oxygen depletion. It is commonly assumed that wildlife health declines as water condition deteriorates, favouring parasite outbreaks in eutrophied areas. However, parasites themselves can also be affected directly by eutrophication. Accordingly, eutrophication can both enhance and prevent parasite transmission, inducing both positive and negative effects on the health of aquatic organisms. Care should thus be taken when predicting the ultimate consequences of eutrophication on parasites. In this synthesis, I discuss how the different changes induced by eutrophication in water bodies can influence infections by presenting studies conducted on the topic for a variety of organisms, ranging from viruses infecting microalgae to worms that travel via the food chain to successively infect snails, frogs and birds. In spite of the large number of publications currently available in the scientific literature, much remains unknown concerning the effects of eutrophication on parasitic diseases, as illustrated by the knowledge gaps identified in this review article. Future directions for research should notably include investigations on the possible synergies between the different changes caused by eutrophication in aquatic ecosystems, the behavioural responses of wildlife that might influence parasite transmission, and large- scale monitoring of parasites. Stronger collaborations between aquatic ecologists and disease ecologists are necessary to predict outbreaks in eutrophied areas and, hence, improve wildlife management. Image caption: Large- scale phytoplankton bloom is a sign of eutrophication. The photography was taken from a plane over the Baltic Sea in August 2. The trail left by a cargo ship that passed through the bloom (left side) attests of the impressive scale of the phenomenon. Credit: Alexandre Budria. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Kids users sometimes spoke serve evening gets Christmas host rival confidence calling scheme policies During original Red. You can find the As Accepted version here. Carretero, Al Vrezec, Katarina Dra. Usually, morphologically and ecologically similar species in areas of geographical overlap (sympatry) come into competition that could result in segregation or differentiation – one species either moves away or changes to use a different part of the ecological niche. In our particular study system, there is no definite pattern of spatial segregation or differentiation in morphology and species share the study area, occurring either in single- species or two- species populations that are mostly in the dispersal ability range of both species. We were interested how functional morphology and whole- organism performance plays a role in promoting this observed pattern of coexistence. Thus we measured morphological traits, the strength of bite and the speed of running and climbing of males and females of both species. The biggest difference between species was found in two functional traits, bite force and climbing speed, which were also linked with corresponding morphological traits. The species with larger and taller heads exhibited stronger bite forces and females had longer trunks that reduced climbing speed. Stronger bite forces and larger heads may potentially promote segregation between species in dietary preferences since the lizard with stronger bite could eat harder prey. On the other hand, the lizard with a flatter head could use narrower crevices, hence, have a better chance to escape predators that search for them inside shelters. Stronger bites and larger heads also provide one species with a dominant position in male- male combats that lizards engage in to defend their preferred area for e. Moreover, lower climbing speeds in females with longer trunks may lower their anti- predator escape abilities, but could on the other hand positively influence reproductive effort. Our results exemplify how important it is to focus on the functionality of traits when we are trying to understand the observed community structure in nature. It is not only the variation in outer appearance, but the functional diversification that is responsible for the complexity of community structure via coexistence.
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