To extract any adaptive benefit, the circadian clock needs to be synchronized to the 24-h day-night cycles. We have investigated if it is a general property of the brain’s circadian clock to recognize social interactions as external time givers. Sociosexual interactions with the opposite sex are universal, prevalent even in the lives of solitary animals. […]
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Flourishing recent comparative studies on senescence have revealed an uncovered diversity across the tree of life of the shapes of the age trajectories of mortality (actuarial senescence) and to a lesser extent of reproduction (reproductive senescence). Evolutionary theories have been called up to explain why some species suffer from positive senescence while others benefit from […]
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Kings and queens of social termites can live for decades, while queens sustain a nearly maximal fertility. We found that they defy aging by multiple gene expression and metabolic changes, while permitting extreme fertility in queens.
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In the city, the seasonal patterns of activity of insect pollinators could be disturbed by the urban microclimate as well as by the presence of ornamental flora. To study this phenomenon, Vincent Zaninotto and his collaborators monitored the activity of insect pollinators in Paris and in the natural environment, from late winter to autumn. In […]
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“Here, we used 37 years of mark-recapture data in two nearby habitats inside a meadow viper Vipera ursinii population to quantify life expectancies, generation times and the shape of actuarial and reproductive senescence.”
Social groups consist of individuals that differ from one another, and many studies show that this diversity improves group efficiency. In social insects, size diversity can, for example, improve the efficiency of foraging, nest building, brood rearing and production of young queens. Thus, colonies that re more diverse are generally also more efficient. Romain Honorio […]
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Smaller organisms are typically more abundant than larger ones, which is a fundamental characteristic of ecological communities. How environmental pulse disturbances affect these « abundance pyramids » remains poorly understood. In a study recently published in Ecology Letters, researchers from iEES Paris and the University of Zürich showed that disturbances which are not size-selective still […]
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