Organisms or societies are resource limited, causing important trade-offs between reproduction and defence. Given such trade-offs, optimal allocation theory predicts that, for animal societies with a soldier caste, allocation to soldiers should reflect local external threats. Although both threat intensity and soldier allocation can vary widely in nature, we currently lack strong evidence that spatial variation in threat can drive the corresponding variation in soldier allocation. The diverse guild of trematode parasites of the California horn snail provides a useful system to address this problem.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/purmorphamine.html  Several of these species form colonies in their hosts with a reproductive division of labour including a soldier caste. Soldiers are non-reproductive and specialized in defence, attacking and killing invading parasites. We quantified invasion threat and soldier allocation for 168 trematode colonies belonging to six species at 26 sites spread among 10 estuaries in temperate and tropical regions. Spatial variation in invasion threat was matched as predicted by the relative number of soldiers for multiple parasite species. Soldier allocation correlated with invasion threat at fine spatial scales, suggesting that allocation is at least partly inducible. These results may represent the first clear documentation of a spatial correlation between allocation to any type of caste and a biotic selective agent.In 1929 Hans Berger discovered the alpha oscillations prominent, ongoing oscillations around 10 Hz in the electroencephalogram of the human brain. These alpha oscillations are among the most widely studied brain signals, related to cognitive phenomena such as attention, memory and consciousness. However, the mechanisms by which alpha oscillations affect human cognition await demonstration. Here, we suggest the honey bee brain as an experimentally more accessible model system for investigating the functional role of alpha oscillations. We found a prominent spontaneous oscillation around 18 Hz that is reduced in amplitude upon olfactory stimulation. Similar to alpha oscillations in primates, the phase of this oscillation biased both timing of neuronal spikes and amplitude of high-frequency gamma activity (40-450 Hz). These results suggest a common role of alpha oscillations across phyla and provide an unprecedented new venue for causal studies on the relationship between neuronal spikes, brain oscillations and cognition.A lineage colonizing a geographic region with no competitors may exhibit rapid diversification due to greater ecological opportunity. The resultant species diversity of this primary-colonizing (incumbent) clade may limit subsequent lineages' ability to persist unless these non-incumbent lineages are ecologically distinct. We compare the diversity in diet-related mandibular morphology of two sympatric murid rodent clades endemic to Luzon Island, Philippines-incumbent Phloeomyini and secondary-colonizing Chrotomyini-to the mandibular morphological diversity of Sahul Hydromyini, the sister clade of Chrotomyini and the incumbent murid lineage on the supercontinent of Sahul. This three-clade comparison allows us to test the hypothesis that incumbent lineages can force persistent ecological distinction of subsequent colonists at the time of colonization and throughout the subsequent history of the two sympatric clades. We find that Chrotomyini forms a subset of the diversity of their clade plus Sahul Hydromyini that minimizes overlap with Phloeomyini. We also infer that this differentiation extends to the stem ancestor of Chrotomyini and Sahul Hydromyini, consistent with a biotic filter imposed by Phloeomyini. Our work illustrates that incumbency has the potential to have a profound influence on the ecomorphological diversity of colonizing lineages at the island scale even when the traits in question are evolving at similar rates among independently colonizing clades.Gut microbial communities (microbiomes) profoundly shape the ecology and evolution of multicellular life. Interactions between host and microbiome appear to be reciprocal, and ecological theory is now being applied to better understand how hosts and their microbiome influence each other. However, some ecological processes that underlie reciprocal host-microbiome interactions may be obscured by the current convention of highly controlled transplantation experiments. Although these approaches have yielded invaluable insights, there is a need for a broader array of approaches to fully understand host-microbiome reciprocity. Using a directed review, we surveyed the breadth of ecological reality in the current literature on gut microbiome transplants with non-human recipients. For 55 studies, we categorized nine key experimental conditions that impact the ecological reality (EcoReality) of the transplant, including host taxon match and donor environment. Using these categories, we rated the EcoReality of each transplant. Encouragingly, the breadth of EcoReality has increased over time, but some components of EcoReality are still relatively unexplored, including recipient host environment and microbiome state. The conceptual framework we develop here maps the landscape of possible EcoReality to highlight where fundamental ecological processes can be considered in future transplant experiments.Evidence for pollinator declines largely originates from mid-latitude regions in North America and Europe. Geographical heterogeneity in pollinator trends combined with geographical biases in pollinator studies can produce distorted extrapolations and limit understanding of pollinator responses to environmental changes. In contrast with the declines experienced in some well-investigated European and North American regions, honeybees seem to have increased recently in some areas of the Mediterranean Basin. Because honeybees can have negative impacts on wild bees, it was hypothesized that a biome-wide alteration in bee pollinator assemblages may be underway in the Mediterranean Basin involving a reduction in the relative number of wild bees. This hypothesis was tested using published quantitative data on bee pollinators of wild and cultivated plants from studies conducted between 1963 and 2017 in 13 countries from the European, African and Asian shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The density of honeybee colonies increased exponentially and wild bees were gradually replaced by honeybees in flowers of wild and cultivated plants.