Every year, contributors to the blog look back on their favourite papers of the previous year and tell us what it was about these publications that stuck in their mind so much. With a range of different topics and reasons, it’s always great to see what each of us thinks makes for a great paper! Find out what we elected as our favourite papers in 2018 and 2017, and read on for this year’s entries:
Perrot-Minnot, M. J., Guyonnet, E., Bollache, L., & Lagrue, C. (2019). Differential patterns of definitive host use by two fish acanthocephalans occurring in sympatry: Pomphorhynchus laevis and Pomphorhynchus tereticollis. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, 8, 135-144.
Chosen by Paula Tierney
Read the full International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife paper here
Sometimes a paper doesn’t have to make huge waves in the broader ecology world to be a great paper and sometimes a paper comes along at just the right time to answer the questions you need answering. Perrot-Minnot et al. 2019 did both for me this year. Since the taxonomic revision of the acanthocephalan parasite Pomphorhychus laevis by Špakulová et al in 2011 resurrected the closely-related species Pomphorhynchus tereticollis, the systematics of the genus in Europe has been something of a taxonomic dumpster fire. It also left one of my PhD chapters with a bit of an identity crisis since,
now that a bunch of former P. laevis populations are assigned to P. tereticollis, I found myself with a manuscript on P. tereticollis that almost exclusively referenced studies on P. laevis. Enter Perrot-Minnot et al. who, along with solving my historical taxonomy referencing woes by introducing me to the term sensu lato, produced an amazingly thorough paper on the ecology of co-occurring P. laevis and P. tereticollis in eastern France in nine(!) different fish hosts AND the intermediate amphipod host. I was pretty blown away by the amount of work that went into this paper as well as some awesome analysis that I’d never seen applied to a host-parasite system like that before. Not only did the authors find evidence for niche segregation in sympatric P. laevis and P. tereticollis, but that the two species did so partly on the basis of fish ecology; P. laevis wasfound predominantly in bentho-pelagic fishes and P. tereticollis in benthic fishes, raising speculation that differential host manipulation in the intermediate amphipod host might drive different microhabitat use and could actually be the culprit behind the transmission bias. A cool paper that not only rejigs our understanding of host occupancy of two dominant parasite species but also digs into the importance of taxonomic resolution and the challenge of determining drivers of host-parasite associations.
da Silva, R., Pearce-Kelly, P., Zimmerman, B., Knott, M., Foden, W., & Conde, D. A. (2019). Assessing the conservation potential of fish and corals in aquariums globally. Journal for nature conservation, 48, 1-11.
Chosen by Andrew Mooney
Read the full Journal for Nature Conservation paper here
Although zoos and aquariums contribute greatly to global biodiversity conservation, their potential is limited by a lack of basic knowledge surrounding how many species they maintain. This is particularly evident for aquariums, where standardised record sharing is in its infancy.
This paper shows for the first time the conservation potential of zoo and aquarium collections to conserve fish and coral species, by looking at all of the species represented within the Species360 member network (the largest standardised zoological database in the world). They show for the first time that (at least!) 3,113 species of fish and 257 species of coral are represented among zoos and aquariums. This represents 8% of all the ‘Threatened’ fish listed under the IUCN. They also align these species with other global conservation scheme such as CITES, EDGE and IUCN. Although simplistic, this paper highlights the important conservation role of zoos and aquariums and also shows the need for greater record sharing and standardisation across institutions.
Korell, L., Auge, H., Chase, J. M., Harpole, S., & Knight, T. M. (2019). We need more realistic climate change experiments for understanding ecosystems of the future. Global change biology.
Chosen by Sam Ross
Read the full Global change biology paper here.
My favourite paper of 2019 is probably this short letter to the editor in Global change biology by Lotte Korell and colleagues. The letter presents a systematic review of climate change experiments that manipulated either temperature or precipitation and measured the response of terrestrial plants in terms of community composition and/or productivity. They show a clear mismatch in the magnitude of temperature/precipitation manipulation and the projected changes in temperature/precipitation in the regions in which the studies were undertaken. The authors conclude with a call for climate change experiments that more realistically manipulate climate variables, which should allow us a more mechanistic understanding of community responses to climate change.
Pepke, M. L., Irestedt, M., Fjeldså, J., Rahbek, C., & Jønsson, K. A. (2019). Reconciling supertramps, great speciators and relict species with the taxon cycle stages of a large island radiation (Aves: Campephagidae). Journal of Biogeography, 46(6), 1214-1225.
Chosen by Fionn Ó Marcaigh
Read the full Journal of Biogeography paper here.
This paper by Le Pepke et al. (2019) provides a beautifully clear explanation of the evolution of island birds, through the illustrative example of the family Campephagidae. Their analysis combines phylogenetics, wing morphology, and range distributions, to build a compelling story on the role of dispersal abilities in the evolution of this group, and how these abilities evolve and change in their turn. They synthesise decades of literature in this field to create one sensible, logical biogeographic framework, incorporating such concepts as taxon cycles, great speciators, and supertramp species. An elegant marriage of theorising and genetic investigation into the purest questions of biogeography: why are species found where they are?
White, M. P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B. W., Hartig, T., Warber, S. L., … & Fleming, L. E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-11.
Chosen by Cian White
Read the full Scientific Reports paper here.
I particularly liked this paper as it sparked an interest in an area I wasn’t familiar with, but has since led me on a journey through the intersection of ecology, psychology and public health. The paper reports the results of a representative survey from England (N = ~20000) where respondents were asked to rate their self reported health and wellbeing which was then correlated with the amount of time spent in nature. The headline result being that spending two hours in nature a week is correlated with increased self reported health and wellbeing, as much as traditional socio-economic factors such as living in a well off versus deprived area, having a high socio-economic status job or meeting the physically active guidelines. This paper was trying to determine a nature ‘dose’, the best return on benefit per time spent and indicates that the field is attempting to push for nature being viewed as a target for public health. There is still a huge amount of work to be done in this area, i.e what aspects of nature are people reacting to, how does someone’s ecological knowledge, openness to experience, nature-relatedness, intention etc moderate the benefits of interacting with nature. Exciting!
Queiroz, N., Humphries, N. E., Couto, A., Vedor, M., Da Costa, I., Sequeira, A. M., … & Abrantes, K. (2019). Global spatial risk assessment of sharks under the footprint of fisheries. Nature, 572(7770), 461-466.
Chosen by Jenny Bortoluzzi
Read the full paper Nature here.
In mid July 2019, this study of the overlap between sharks and fisheries came out. It garnered a lot of attention internationally from scientists and the media alike. Its message was clear: pelagic sharks are under constant threat from fisheries who leave them very little refuge spaces. These sharks, both commercially valuable species and protected species, overlap in space by up to 74% with longline fisheries and suffer from little to no regulations and even less enforcement. This brought to light the dire need for more protection and management in the High Seas (those areas of the oceans outside of any national jurisdictions – most of the oceans). But beyond these clear and
strong messages, this paper tops my literature list of 2019 because it demonstrates what we scientists can achieve through collaboration. With 153 authors who all contributed data collected all over the world, it is one of the best examples of scientists working towards a common goal and achieving a result which can be used as evidence for policy makers down the line. And it wasn’t long until this came into action: at the ICCAT meeting (an inter-governmental fishery organization responsible for the conservation of tuna-like species in the Atlantic Ocean) which took place in November, the members of the convention adopted groundbreaking catch limits for blue sharks, a first in the world. No doubt research such as this one will be used as evidence in the current negotiations taking place at the UN towards an international conservation treaty for the high seas which is expected to be finalised this year…
Tikhonov, M., Kachru, S., & Fisher, D. S. (2019). Modeling the interplay between plastic tradeoffs and evolution in changing environments. BioRxiv, 711531.
Chosen by Jean-Francois Arnoldi
Read the full BioRxiv paper here
Tikhonov’s work definitely lies in the abstract end of the research spectrum, but I always find that his papers touch in very clever ways on difficult and deep topics of ecology and evolution. In this paper, he and colleagues propose a simple -enlightening- model for the evolution of performance tradeoffs, a central concept in evolutionary thinking.
Their idea is to view evolution as the motion of a high dimensional subspace (representing the genome and its expression) driven by the need to express the phenotype most suited to one specific environment. Tradeoffs emerge when two different phenotypes are targeted (e.g. to adapt to changing environments). The focus here is on how those tradeoffs themselves evolve. This perspective captures a key feedback loop, paraphrasing their abstract: evolutionary history shapes tradeoff strength, which, in turn, shapes evolutionary future. In other words, genomes with identical fitness can have different evolutionary properties, shaped by prior environmental exposure. Overall this paper does what I think theory should: explore our imagination beyond the obvious and thus expand our intuitions of Nature.