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Lay Summary Many plants reward pollinators with nectar (carbohydrates) and pollen (protein), yet little is known about how bees structure their collection of these 2 resources. We found that bumble bees use information about both the nutritional needs of their colony and floral resources when making decisions about which resources to collect and in what order. These findings offer insight into the ecological consequences of nutritionally diverse floral rewards.

AbstractAphids, like most animals, mount a diverse set of defenses against pathogens. For aphids, two of the best studied defenses are symbiont-conferred protection and transgenerational wing induction. Aphids can harbor bacterial symbionts that provide protection against pathogens, parasitoids and predators, as well as against other environmental stressors. In response to signals of danger, aphids also protect not themselves but their offspring by producing more winged than unwinged offspring as a way to ensure that their progeny may be able to escape deteriorating conditions. Such transgenerational wing induction has been studied most commonly as a response to overcrowding of host plants and presence of predators, but recent evidence suggests that pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) may also begin to produce a greater proportion of winged offspring when infected with fungal pathogens. Here, we explore this phenomenon further by asking how protective symbionts, pathogen dosage and environmental conditions influence this response. Overall, while we find some evidence that protective symbionts can modulate transgenerational wing induction in response to fungal pathogens, we observe that transgenerational wing induction in response to fungal infection is highly variable. That variability cannot be explained entirely by symbiont association, by pathogen load or by environmental stress, leaving the possibility that a complex interplay of genotypic and environmental factors may together influence this trait.

Offspring size is a fundamental trait in disparate biological fields of study. This trait can be measured as the size of plant seeds, animal eggs, or live young, and it influences ecological interactions, organism fitness, maternal investment, and embryonic development. Although multiple evolutionary processes have been predicted to drive the evolution of offspring size, the phylogenetic distribution of this trait remains poorly understood, due to the difficulty of reliably collecting and comparing offspring size data from many species. Here we present a dataset of 10,449 morphological descriptions of insect eggs, with records for 6,706 unique insect species and representatives from every extant hexapod order. The dataset includes eggs whose volumes span more than eight orders of magnitude. We created this dataset by partially automating the extraction of egg traits from the primary literature. In the process, we overcame challenges associated with large-scale phenotyping by designing and employing custom bioinformatic solutions to common problems. We matched the taxa in this dataset to the currently accepted scientific names in taxonomic and genetic databases, which will facilitate the use of these data for testing pressing evolutionary hypotheses in offspring size evolution. Design Type(s)software development objective • morphology-based phylogenetic analysis objective • species comparison designMeasurement Type(s)morphologyTechnology Type(s)digital curationFactor Type(s)shape • sizeSample Characteristic(s)Hexapoda • egg Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format)

eLife digest Humans transform natural ecosystems worldwide into towns and cities, replacing natural habitat with human-built surfaces. This loss of habitat and increase in human activity make suburban areas difficult for some species to survive in, raising concerns that developed areas become ecologically unbalanced as they lose biodiversity. However, the preservation of urban green space and lack of hunting could also open the door for some species to thrive in the midst of large human populations. Indeed, some animals, mammals in particular, have grown more tolerant of humans and appear to have adapted to suburban landscapes around the world. Some species that have been exclusively living in the wilderness, such as a small carnivore called the fisher, are even moving back into cities. Research into how mammals are coping with the urbanization of their habitats has produced conflicting results. Studies that explore a variety of cities and habitats would help to clear up this confusion. Parsons et al. worked with citizen scientist volunteers to survey the mammals at 1,427 sites across Washington DC and Raleigh, North Carolina. The volunteers set up motion-triggered cameras in these sites, which covered a full range of urban and wild habitats, including back yards and large nature preserves. The cameras detected similar or higher numbers of mammal species in suburban sites compared to wild areas. Indeed, most species appear to use suburban areas at least as much as wild land. Urban green space is especially important; it is used by less urban-adapted species like coyotes to navigate areas that are densely populated by humans. The results presented by Parsons et al. suggest that many mammals have indeed adapted to the suburban environment over the last few decades, resulting in more balanced urban ecosystems. More testing in other cities will help to determine how general this pattern of adaptation is, and provide us with knowledge that could help us to conserve many different species. However, some species were still most abundant in wild areas, emphasizing the need to also conserve wildlands and to minimize our impact on natural ecosystems. Developed areas are thought to have low species diversity, low animal abundance, few native predators, and thus low resilience and ecological function. Working with citizen scientist volunteers to survey mammals at 1427 sites across two development gradients (wild-rural-exurban-suburban-urban) and four plot types (large forests, small forest fragments, open areas and residential yards) in the eastern US, we show that developed areas actually had significantly higher or statistically similar mammalian occupancy, relative abundance, richness and diversity compared to wild areas. However, although some animals can thrive in suburbia, conservation of wild areas and preservation of green space within cities are needed to protect sensitive species and to give all species the chance to adapt and persist in the Anthropocene.

AbstractIn nature, plants regularly interact with herbivores and with wind. Herbivores can wound and alter the structure of plants, whereas wind can exert aerodynamic forces that cause the plants to flutter or sway. While herbivory has many negative consequences for plants, fluttering in wind can be beneficial for plants by facilitating gas exchange and loss of excess heat. Little is known about how herbivores affect plant motion in wind. We tested how the mass of an herbivore resting on a broad leaf of the tulip tree Liriodendron tulipifera, and the damage caused by herbivores, affected the motion of the leaf in wind. For this, we placed mimics of herbivores on the leaves, varying each herbivore's mass or position, and used high‐speed video to measure how the herbivore mimics affected leaf movement and reconfiguration at two wind speeds inside a laboratory wind tunnel. In a similar setup, we tested how naturally occurring herbivore damage on the leaves affected leaf movement and reconfiguration. We found that the mass of an herbivore resting on a leaf can change that leaf's orientation relative to the wind and interfere with the ability of the leaf to reconfigure into a smaller, more streamlined shape. A large herbivore load slowed the leaf's fluttering frequency, while naturally occurring damage from herbivores increased the leaf's fluttering frequency. We conclude that herbivores can alter the physical interactions between wind and plants by two methods: (1) acting as a point mass on the plant while it is feeding and (2) removing tissue from the plant. Altering a plant's interaction with wind can have physical and physiological consequences for the plant. Thus, future studies of plants in nature should consider the effect of herbivory on plant–wind interactions, and vice versa.

The freud Python package is a powerful library for analyzing simulation data. Written with modern simulation and data analysis workflows in mind, freud provides a Python interface to fast, parallelized C++ routines that run efficiently on laptops, workstations, and supercomputing clusters. The package provides the core tools for finding particle neighbors in periodic systems, and offers a uniform API to a wide variety of methods implemented using these tools. As such, freud users can access standard methods such as the radial distribution function as well as newer, more specialized methods such as the potential of mean force and torque and local crystal environment analysis with equal ease. While many comparable tools place a heavy emphasis on reading and operating on trajectory file formats, freud instead accepts numerical arrays of data directly as inputs. By remaining agnostic to its data source, freud is suitable for analyzing any coarse-grained particle simulation, regardless of the original data representation or simulation method. When used for on-the-fly analysis in conjunction with scriptable simulation software such as HOOMD-blue, freud enables smart simulations that adapt to the current state of the system, allowing users to study phenomena such as nucleation and growth. Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communications. For the source code on Github, see https://github.com/glotzerlab/freud . For the documentation on ReadTheDocs, see https://freud.readthedocs.io/en/stable

Plants form belowground associations with mycorrhizal fungi in one of the most common symbioses on Earth. However, few large-scale generalizations exist for the structure and function of mycorrhizal symbioses, as the nature of this relationship varies from mutualistic to parasitic and is largely context-dependent. We announce the public release of MycoDB, a database of 4,010 studies (from 438 unique publications) to aid in multi-factor meta-analyses elucidating the ecological and evolutionary context in which mycorrhizal fungi alter plant productivity. Over 10 years with nearly 80 collaborators, we compiled data on the response of plant biomass to mycorrhizal fungal inoculation, including meta-analysis metrics and 24 additional explanatory variables that describe the biotic and abiotic context of each study. We also include phylogenetic trees for all plants and fungi in the database. To our knowledge, MycoDB is the largest ecological meta-analysis database. We aim to share these data to highlight significant gaps in mycorrhizal research and encourage synthesis to explore the ecological and evolutionary generalities that govern mycorrhizal functioning in ecosystems. ispartof: Scientific Data vol:10 issue:3 ispartof: location:England status: published