High peak metabolic rates may provide a performance advantage, but it may also entail a physiological cost. A long-held assumption is that high mass-specific energy expenditure is associated with short lifespan. To examine the relationship between energy expenditure and lifespan we asked two questions. First, do individuals have a consistent rate of metabolism throughout their life? Second, is ...

BACKGROUND Species movement responses to landscape structures have been studied using a variety of methods, but movement research is still in need of simple methods that help predicting and comparing movements across structurally different landscapes. We demonstrate how habitat-specific movement models can be used to disentangle causes of differentiated movement patterns in structurally differe...

Ecologists are challenged to construct models of the biological consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation. Here, we use a metapopulation model to predict the distribution of the Glanville fritillary butterfly during 22 years across a large heterogeneous landscape with 4,415 small dry meadows. The majority (74%) of the 125 networks into which the meadows were clustered are below the extinct...

The maternally transmitted bacterium Wolbachia pipientis is well known for spreading and persisting in insect populations through manipulation of the fitness of its host. Here, we identify three new Wolbachia pipientis strains, wHho, wHho2 and wHho3, infecting Hyposoter horticola, a specialist wasp parasitoid of the Glanville fritillary butterfly. The wHho strain (ST435) infects about 50% of th...

used as an anti-inflammatory herbal medicine in China. We found that L. japonica produced in Henan and Shandong Provinces has the most potent anti-inflammatory effect. The herbs grown in these two provinces are recognized as geo-authentic and possess a higher content of therapeutically effective components in the flowers. The ecological factors for the cultivation of geo-authentic L. japonica h...