In macroevolutionary studies, different approaches are commonly used to measure phylogenetic signal--the tendency of related taxa to resemble one another--including the K statistic and the Mantel test. The latter was recently criticized for lacking statistical power. Using new simulations, we show that the power of the Mantel test depends on the metrics used to define trait distances and phylog...

BACKGROUND Performance of migrating birds can be affected by a number of intrinsic and extrinsic factors like morphology, meteorological conditions and migration strategies. We compared travel speeds of four raptor species during their crossing of the Sahara desert. Focusing the analyses on this region allows us to compare different species under equivalent conditions in order to disentangle wh...

Among-site variation in metacommunities (beta diversity) is typically correlated with the distance separating the sites (spatial lag). This distance decay in similarity pattern has been linked to both niche-based and dispersal-based community assembly hypotheses. Here we show that beta diversity patterns in community composition, when supplemented with functional-trait information, can be used ...

Molecular barcoding can serve as a powerful tool in wildlife forensics and may prove to be a vital aid in conserving organisms that are threatened by illegal wildlife trade, such as turtles (Order Testudines). We produced cytochrome oxidase subunit one (COI) sequences (650 bp) for 174 turtle species and combined these with publicly available sequences for 50 species to produce a data set repres...

Mixed cropping is practised widely in developing countries and is gaining increasing interest for sustainable agriculture in developed countries. Plants in intercrops grow differently from plants in single crops, due to interspecific plant interactions, but adaptive plant morphological responses to competition in mixed stands have not been studied in detail. Here the maize (Zea mays) response t...

Mate choice is context dependent, but the importance of current context to interspecific mating and hybridization is largely unexplored. An important influence on mate choice is predation risk. We investigated how variation in an indirect cue of predation risk, distance to shelter, influences mate choice in the swordtail Xiphophorus birchmanni, a species which sometimes hybridizes with X. malin...

Bergmann's rule-the tendency for body size to increase in colder environments-remains controversial today, despite 150 years of research. Considerable debate has revolved around whether the rule applies within or among species. However, this debate has generally not considered that clade-level relationships are caused by both intra- and interspecific effects. In this article, we implement a nov...

1. The outcome of interspecific competition for food resources depends both on the competitors’ sensory abilities and on environmental conditions. In laboratory experiments we tested the influence of daylight and darkness on feeding behaviour and specific growth rate (SGR) of two species with different sensory abilities. 2. We used perch (Perca fluviatilis) as a visually orientated, and ruffe (...

Interspecific differences in organismal stoichiometry (OS) have been documented in a wide range of animal taxa and are of significant interest for understanding evolutionary patterns in OS. In contrast, intraspecific variation in animal OS has generally been treated as analytical noise or random variation, even though available data suggest intraspecific variability in OS is widespread. Here, w...

Genetic variation in Jatropha curcas, a prospective biodiesel plant, is limited, and interspecific hybridization needed for its genetic improvement. Progeny from interspecific crosses between J. curcas and Jatropha integerrima can be used to improve agronomic characters and to increase oil content and yield. However, these hybrids have not been characterized cytologically. The present study was...