A blog post by Kathryn Stewart (@Kat_A_Stewart) on our paper “ The role of genetic diversity in the evolution and maintenance of environmentally-cued, male alternative reproductive tactics” by Stewart et al. (2019), published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. 19:58. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scientists have pitted nature vs. nurture against one another for a long time. In fact,…

To contribute towards integrating the field of eco-evolutionary dynamics and move the field forward, scientific journals from the British Ecological Society, including the Journal of Animal Ecology, have just published a cross-journal special feature entitled “Eco-evolutionary dynamics across scales”, edited by Franziska Brunner, Jacques Deere, Martijn Egas, Christophe Eizaguirre and Joost Raeymaekers. How evolutionary changes…

We are in great need of an integrative framework that allows ecologists to predict life history strategies (i.e. the different ways in which individuals trade-off resource investment into survival or reproduction) from functional traits: traits of individuals that inform on the performance of a population of plants or animals as a whole. To contribute towards…

If you have read some about bulb mites (Rhizoglyphus robini), you might know that adult males show one of two distinct morphs: fighters, which have these thickened legs with sharp ends that they can use to kill other mites, and scramblers (see photo on the right). These two types of males occur in single populations…

Individuals, be they plants or animals, are rarely equal. Does it matter that individuals differ? More specifically, what are the consequences for the dynamics of populations of such differences between individuals, also referred to as individual heterogeneity? And how does individual heterogeneity affect the evolution of traits? The scientific journal Oikos has just published a…