Carlos Roberto Fonseca, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in Brazil, discusses his article: The Red Queen unveils the sexual and mating strategies of flowers In 1876, Charles Darwin wrote the book “The effects of cross and self-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom” to answer a simple, but important question: if self-fertilisation is the…
Kari Sogera Iamba, University of South Bohemia and the Institute of Entomology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, discusses his article: Insects and non-woody plants slow down tropical forest succession: A community-wide experiment in Papua New Guinea We investigated the factors driving rainforest regeneration in canopy gaps created by tree falls or selective logging. Ecological…
Plant enemies like insect herbivores and fungal pathogens eat or degrade plant tissue. How does this affect performance? Photo: Josh Brian We are invasion biologists, studying how and why species become invasive. One of the biggest hypotheses in our field is the ‘enemy release hypothesis’, which says that species become invasive because they escape from…
Once upon a time… large mammals flourished in the lush tropical forests of South America. Those giants evolved as key ecosystem engineers, acting as top-down regulators of ecological processes, either by predating on other smaller-sized animals, or feeding on plants, eating fruits and seeds, browsing and chewing leaves and branches, or even by trampling and…
Diego Anjos is an early career ecologist from Brazil, who’s research focuses on plant-insect interactions and multilayer networks in the Brazilian savanna. This post by Diego is part of the BES journal’s Black History Month blog series, which will be taking place throughout October 2020. We want to acknowledge and celebrate the work of Black…
A paper issue 100:4 in the Journal (Resource concentration by insects and implications for plant populations) by Andrea Stephens and Judith Myers explores how resource concentration by insects effects plants, using both modeling and empirical approaches. Read the abstract here. I caught up with Andrea a few weeks ago to do a video interview. Subscribe to our YouTube posts…
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