The Desert locust Schistocerca gregaria is a major world pest that causes substantial agricultural and economic damage. Effective pest control relies on effective monitoring, which requires knowledge of locust microhabitat selection. Yet little is known about microhabitat selection of solitarious adult locusts in the field. We conducted field surveys to investigate fine-scale diel temporal and ...

Understanding how food distribution influences habitat choice is a central goal of behavioural ecology. Because animals select habitats at different scales, and because the selection criteria used may be scale-dependent, studies examining the significance of food in relation to habitat selection should ideally incorporate more than one spatial scale. We relied on spatial ecology data and prey a...

Numerous restoration campaigns focused on re-establishing species-rich floodplain meadows of Central Europe, whose species composition is essentially controlled by regular flooding. Climate change predictions expect strong alterations on the discharge regime of Europe's large rivers with little-known consequences on floodplain meadow plants. In this study, we aim to determine the effects of flo...

We investigated whether or not habitat structure contributes to the separation of two sister species of lemurs and their hybrids. For this, we studied Microcebus murinus and M. griseorufus along a continuous vegetation gradient where populations of the two species occur in sympatry or in allopatry. In allopatry, the two species are generalists without any sign of microhabitat selectivity. In sy...

Ectotherms in water experience rates of heat transfer at least two orders of magnitude greater than in air, seriously constraining their thermoregulatory capabilities. Yet, even in water, individuals may exert control over body temperature (Tb) via behaviors such as selecting thermally favorable microhabitats. The interactions among body size, physiology, and behavior on the thermal biology of ...

Most habitats in nature are heterogeneous, incorporating favorable and unfavorable microhabitats for different animals, based on their ecological niche. Unsuitable microhabitats have negative consequences for individual growth and survival. Animals, therefore, should fine-tune their location within the habitat by dispersing away from such microhabitats. We studied the suitability of different c...

Habitat fragmentation and degradation seriously threaten native animal communities. We studied the response of a small marsupial, the agile antechinus Antechinus agilis, to several environmental variables in anthropogenically fragmented Eucalyptus forest in south-east Australia. Agile antechinus were captured more in microhabitats dominated by woody debris than in other microhabitats. Relative ...

Archaeal community structures in microhabitats in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent chimney structure were evaluated through the combined use of culture-independent molecular analyses and enrichment culture methods. A black smoker chimney was obtained from the PACMANUS site in the Manus Basin near Papua New Guinea, and subsamples were obtained from vertical and horizontal sections. The elemental com...

[1] The surface pattern of vegetation influences the composition and humification of peat laid down during the development of a bog, producing a subsurface hydrological structure that is expected to affect both the rate and pattern of water flow. Subsurface peat structures are routinely derived from the inspection of peat cores. However, logistical limits on the number of cores that can be coll...

Mosquito populations are largely regulated by processes occurring at the larval stage. We sampled mosquito larval microhabitats (mostly water-holding containers) in six neighborhoods in the Washington, DC, area that varied in socioeconomic status (SES) and housing structure (row houses vs. stand-alone houses) to test associations among these neighborhood characteristics, microhabitat abundance ...