Gene flow maintains a large genetic difference in clutch size at a small spatial scale

Understanding the capacity of natural populations to adapt to their local environment is a central topic in evolutionary biology. Phenotypic differences between populations may have a genetic basis, but showing that they reflect different adaptive optima requires the quantification of both gene flow and selection. Good empirical data are rare. Using data on a spatially structured island population of great tits (Parus major), we show here that a persistent difference in mean clutch size between two subpopulations only a few kilometres apart has a major genetic component. We also show that immigrants from outside the island carry genes for large clutches. But gene flow into one subpopulation is low, as a result of a low immigration rate together with strong selection against immigrant genes. This has allowed for adaptation to the island environment and the maintenance of small clutches. In the other area, however, higher gene flow prevents local adaptation and maintains larger clutches. We show that the observed small-scale genetic difference in clutch size is not due to divergent selection on the island, but to different levels of gene flow from outside the island. Our findings illustrate the large effect of immigration on the evolution of local adaptations and on genetic population structure.     

华中五味子叶片形态结构的可塑性研究

分别对产自安徽黄山和甘肃文县的两个华中五味子种群不同发育阶段叶片的形态解剖特征进行比较,讨论了叶片表型可塑性及其生态学意义.研究结果表明:1)在种群水平上,叶片形态结构随环境条件的变化表现出一定的环境可塑性,文县种群表现出相对的旱生特征:叶片小而厚、栅栏组织发达;黄山种群则表现出相对的湿生特征:叶片大而薄、栅栏组织较薄、海绵组织相对发达;这是叶片对水分条件随地理分布而表现出的空间异质性的适应策略;2)在个体水平上,叶片形态结构随发育阶段的变化而表现出一定的发育可塑性,下层叶表现出典型的阴生叶特点:叶片薄、气孔密度较小、栅栏组织极不发达、栅栏细胞椭圆形或漏斗形、海绵组织发达;中、上层叶表现出阳生叶特征:叶片较厚、气孔密度大、栅栏组织相对较为发达、栅栏细胞长柱形.这种发育可塑性是叶片对光照条件随个体发育而表现出的时间异质性的一种适应策略.     

光竞争条件下邻域效应对植物高生长可塑性的影响

构建了以个体为基础,空间明晰的"影响域"模型来研究植物高生长对局域光竞争的可塑性反应.结果表明:植物个体会将其高度维持在一最优值以使其适合度最大,这一最优高度值会随着植物个体所经受的局域光竞争强度的增加而增大.种群中小个体相对于大个体能更早地将其高度维持在最优值,但小个体由于邻域光竞争强度过大而导致的不能继续维持在最优高度及随后的死亡过程也比大个体要早.这种植物个体间高生长可塑反应的不同步性是由于个体的局域光竞争环境存在差异而导致的.研究表明空间分布与邻域效应对植物种群中多样性的高度和高生长策略的产生具有重要意义.在植物高生长的可塑性研究中,忽略邻域效应的"平均作用"博弈理论模型往往会导致片面的,甚至是错误的结论.     

Evolutionary origin and development of snake fangs

Many advanced snakes use fangs-specialized teeth associated with a venom gland-to introduce venom into prey or attacker. Various front- and rear-fanged groups are recognized, according to whether their fangs are positioned anterior (for example cobras and vipers) or posterior (for example grass snakes) in the upper jaw. A fundamental controversy in snake evolution is whether or not front and rear fangs share the same evolutionary and developmental origin. Resolving this controversy could identify a major evolutionary transition underlying the massive radiation of advanced snakes, and the associated developmental events. Here we examine this issue by visualizing the tooth-forming epithelium in the upper jaw of 96 snake embryos, covering eight species. We use the sonic hedgehog gene as a marker, and three-dimensionally reconstruct the development in 41 of the embryos. We show that front fangs develop from the posterior end of the upper jaw, and are strikingly similar in morphogenesis to rear fangs. This is consistent with their being homologous. In front-fanged snakes, the anterior part of the upper jaw lacks sonic hedgehog expression, and ontogenetic allometry displaces the fang from its posterior developmental origin to its adult front position-consistent with an ancestral posterior position of the front fang. In rear-fanged snakes, the fangs develop from an independent posterior dental lamina and retain their posterior position. In light of our findings, we put forward a new model for the evolution of snake fangs: a posterior subregion of the tooth-forming epithelium became developmentally uncoupled from the remaining dentition, which allowed the posterior teeth to evolve independently and in close association with the venom gland, becoming highly modified in different lineages. This developmental event could have facilitated the massive radiation of advanced snakes in the Cenozoic era, resulting in the spectacular diversity of snakes seen today.     

基于自适应并行遗传算法优化设计的有源滤波器

提出一种用于有源滤波器的改进自适应并行遗传算法设计.引入了两个自适应算子:其一根据进化过程实现交叉和变异概率的自动调节;其二通过设计随机个体集和健壮个体集,实现种群个体的多样性和保护适应度高的个体不被破坏.采用基于岛屿的交换模型实现多种群间信息交换,扩大了种群的规模和相应的搜索空间.给出了利用该方法设计四阶切比雪夫低通滤波器的设计结果,并与基本遗传算法进行了比较实验,结果表明该算法收敛速度快、精度高,有效地克服了早熟现象.为大规模有源滤波器设计提供了方法上的支持.     

A transitional snake from the Late Cretaceous period of North America

Snakes are the most diverse group of lizards, but their origins and early evolution remain poorly understood owing to a lack of transitional forms. Several major issues remain outstanding, such as whether snakes originated in a marine or terrestrial environment and how their unique feeding mechanism evolved. The Cretaceous Coniophis precedens was among the first Mesozoic snakes discovered, but until now only an isolated vertebra has been described and it has therefore been overlooked in discussions of snake evolution. Here we report on previously undescribed material from this ancient snake, including the maxilla, dentary and additional vertebrae. Coniophis is not an anilioid as previously thought a revised phylogenetic analysis of Ophidia shows that it instead represents the most primitive known snake. Accordingly, its morphology and ecology are critical to understanding snake evolution. Coniophis occurs in a continental floodplain environment, consistent with a terrestrial rather than a marine origin; furthermore, its small size and reduced neural spines indicate fossorial habits, suggesting that snakes evolved from burrowing lizards. The skull is intermediate between that of lizards and snakes. Hooked teeth and an intramandibular joint indicate that Coniophis fed on relatively large, soft-bodied prey. However, the maxilla is firmly united with the skull, indicating an akinetic rostrum. Coniophis therefore represents a transitional snake, combining a snake-like body and a lizard-like head. Subsequent to the evolution of a serpentine body and carnivory, snakes evolved a highly specialized, kinetic skull, which was followed by a major adaptive radiation in the Early Cretaceous period. This pattern suggests that the kinetic skull was a key innovation that permitted the diversification of snakes.     

Snake circumvents constraints on prey size

For animals who are unable to take bites out of their food, the size of the food item that can be consumed is constrained by the maximal size of the mouth opening (gape)--snakes are an example of gape-limited predators and they usually swallow their prey whole. Here we describe unique feeding behaviours in two closely related species of snake, which circumvent their gape limitation by removing and consuming pieces from newly moulted crabs that are too large to be swallowed intact. This evolutionary innovation is surprising, as the needle-like teeth and highly mobile bones that facilitate the capture and engulfment of large, whole prey by snakes are ill-suited both to cutting and to generating large bite forces.     

Predators increase the risk of catastrophic extinction of prey populations.

There has been considerable research on both top-down effects and on disturbances in ecological communities; however, the interaction between the two, when the disturbance is catastrophic, has rarely been examined. Predators may increase the probability of prey extinction resulting from a catastrophic disturbance both by reducing prey population size and by changing ecological traits of prey individuals such as habitat characteristics in a way that increases the vulnerability of prey species to extinction. We show that a major hurricane in the Bahamas led to the extinction of lizard populations on most islands onto which a predator had been experimentally introduced, whereas no populations became extinct on control islands. Before the hurricane, the predator had reduced prey populations to about half of those on control islands. Two months after the hurricane, we found only recently hatched individuals--apparently lizards survived the inundating storm surge only as eggs. On predator-introduction islands, those hatchling populations were a smaller fraction of pre-hurricane populations than on control islands. Egg survival allowed rapid recovery of prey populations to pre-hurricane levels on all control islands but on only a third of predator-introduction islands--the other two-thirds lost their prey populations. Thus climatic disturbance compounded by predation brought prey populations to extinction.     

Adaptive plasticity in mate preference linked to differences in reproductive effort

There is abundant evidence for the existence of marked mate preferences in natural populations, but the occurrence of within-population variation in mate preferences has received little attention and is often regarded as nonadaptive deviation from the optimal norm. Here we show experimentally that the preference of female collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis for male forehead patch size, a sexually selected trait, varies with the time of breeding, an environmental factor with strong effects on reproductive success. Contrary to expectations based on time-constrained choice models, only late-breeding females prefer males with a large patch size. The variation in mate preference matches a seasonal change in female reproductive success: long-term data reveal a positive relationship between female reproductive success and male patch size exclusively in late breeders. In addition, female reproductive effort, as assessed by clutch size, appears to be adjusted relative to both timing of breeding and male phenotype. We conclude that not only can mate preferences display adaptive plasticity within populations, but this plasticity can also be linked to differences in reproductive investment.     

Population density drives the local evolution of a threshold dimorphism

Evolution can favour more than one reproductive tactic among conspecifics of the same sex. Under the conditional evolutionarily stable strategy, individuals adopt the tactic that generates the highest fitness return for their status: large males guard females, whereas small males sneak copulations. Tactics change at the status at which fitness benefits switch from favouring one tactic to favouring the alternative. This 'switchpoint' is expressed in many species as a threshold between divergent morphologies. Environmental and demographic parameters that influence the relative fitness of male tactics are predicted to determine a population's switchpoint and consequently whether the population is monomorphic or dimorphic. Here we show threshold evolution in the forceps dimorphism of the European earwig Forficula auricularia and document the transition from completely monomorphic to classical male-dimorphic populations over a distance of only 40 km. Because the superior fighting ability of the dominant morph will be more frequently rewarded at high encounter rates, population density is likely to be a key determinant of the relative fitness of the alternative tactics, and consequently the threshold. We show that, as predicted, population density correlates strongly with the shift in threshold, and that this factor drives the local evolution of the male dimorphism in these island populations. Our data provide evidence for the origin of phenotypic diversity within populations, through the evolution of a switchpoint in a conditional strategy that has responded to local population density.     

Patterns of predation in a diverse predator-prey system

There are many cases where animal populations are affected by predators and resources in terrestrial ecosystems, but the factors that determine when one or the other predominates remain poorly understood. Here we show, using 40 years of data from the highly diverse mammal community of the Serengeti ecosystem, East Africa, that the primary cause of mortality for adults of a particular species is determined by two factors--the species diversity of both the predators and prey and the body size of that prey species relative to other prey and predators. Small ungulates in Serengeti are exposed to more predators, owing to opportunistic predation, than are larger ungulates; they also suffer greater predation rates, and experience strong predation pressure. A threshold occurs at prey body sizes of approximately 150 kg, above which ungulate species have few natural predators and exhibit food limitation. Thus, biodiversity allows both predation (top-down) and resource limitation (bottom-up) to act simultaneously to affect herbivore populations. This result may apply generally in systems where there is a diversity of predators and prey.     

不育控制下食饵-捕食者模型的Hopf分支

不育控制是害鼠治理的一种方法.害鼠种群与其他种群有着各种各样的联系,当害鼠种群在不育控制下改变其动力学行为时,与其相关的种群也随着改变其行为.建立了食饵-捕食者模型,其中害鼠是捕食者,对其进行不育控制.利用Hurwitz判据、中心流型定理、形式级数法、Hopf分支理论等分析了模型平衡点的稳定性和Hopf分支现象.有时,随着不育率增加,害鼠数量线性减少,其食饵数量线性增加;有时,不育控制会使害鼠及其食饵数量大幅度周期变化.因此,进行不育控制前,要对害鼠及其食饵有充分的了解,选择适当的不育率.     

Sex releases the speed limit on evolution

Explaining the evolutionary maintenance of sex remains a key problem in evolutionary biology. One potential benefit of sex is that it may allow a more rapid adaptive response when environmental conditions change, by increasing the efficiency with which selection can fix beneficial mutations. Here I show that sex can increase the rate of adaptation in the facultatively sexual single-celled chlorophyte Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, but that the benefits of sex depend crucially on the size of the population that is adapting: sex has a marked effect in large populations but little effect in small populations. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the benefits of sex in a novel environment, including stochastic effects in small populations, clonal interference and epistasis between beneficial alleles. These results indicate that clonal interference is important in this system.     

改进的自适应遗传算法及其工程应用

引进小生境技术、种群迁移以及增加杂交个体之间的海明距离对自适应遗传算法进行了改进,从而建立了改进的自适应遗传算法,改善了传统的遗传算法局部收敛和早熟的现象,大大加快了全局搜索的速度以及搜索全局最优解的概率.工程实例表明:提出的改进自适应遗传算法应用于岩土工程的位移反分析具有搜索速度快、精度高等优点;同时对初始种群的形成方式、种群规模以及最大杂交概率、最大变异概率进行了参数分析.     

Habitat structure and population persistence in an experimental community

Understanding spatial population dynamics is fundamental for many questions in ecology and conservation. Many theoretical mechanisms have been proposed whereby spatial structure can promote population persistence, in particular for exploiter-victim systems (host-parasite/pathogen, predator-prey) whose interactions are inherently oscillatory and therefore prone to extinction of local populations. Experiments have confirmed that spatial structure can extend persistence, but it has rarely been possible to identify the specific mechanisms involved. Here we use a model-based approach to identify the effects of spatial population processes in experimental systems of bean plants (Phaseolus lunatus), herbivorous mites (Tetranychus urticae) and predatory mites (Phytoseiulus persimilis). On isolated plants, and in a spatially undivided experimental system of 90 plants, prey and predator populations collapsed; however, introducing habitat structure allowed long-term persistence. Using mechanistic models, we determine that spatial population structure did not contribute to persistence, and spatially explicit models are not needed. Rather, habitat structure reduced the success of predators at locating prey outbreaks, allowing between-plant asynchrony of local population cycles due to random colonization events.     

Evidence of intra-specific competition for food in a pelagic seabird

The factors affecting the population dynamics of seabirds have long intrigued biologists. Current data suggest that density-dependent depletion of prey during the breeding season may regulate population size. However, much of the evidence for this has been circumstantial, and the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Here, we show that the per capita population growth rates of northern gannet Morus bassanus at colonies in Britain and Ireland have declined with increasing population size. Furthermore, direct observations reveal that the mean foraging trip duration of breeding gannets is positively correlated with colony size, both among colonies of different sizes in the same year, and within colonies as they change in size. To understand this phenomenon, we have developed a model which demonstrates that disturbance of fish alone can readily generate conditions under which gannets at larger colonies have to travel further to obtain food.     

基于并行免疫遗传算法基因表达数据的动态模糊聚类

提出一种改进的并行免疫遗传算法, 通过在群体规模上引入“岛”的概念, 实现了可变的群体规模; 通过在适应度函数内引入免疫算子, 避免了算法过早收敛. 因此, 解决了寻优算法中局部收敛的困扰, 提高了获得全局最优解的几率. 把此算法应用于斯坦福大学酵母细胞周期表达数据库的数据进行共表达聚类, 并将实验结果与Spellman按照功能基因组学进行聚类所得结果进行了对比, 证明了所给算法在功能基因组 学聚类上的有效性.     

The origin of the vertebrate jaw:Intersection between developmental biology-based model and fossil evidence

The origin of the vertebrate jaw has been reviewed based on the molecular,developmental and paleontological evidences.Advances in developmental genetics have accumulated to propose the heterotopy theory of jaw evolution,i.e.the jaw evolved as a novelty through a heterotopic shift of mesenchyme-epithelial interaction.According to this theory,the disassociation of the nasohypophyseal complex is a fundamental prerequisite for the origin of the jaw,since the median position of the nasohypophyseal placode in cyclostome head development precludes the forward growth of the neural-crest-derived craniofacial ectomesenchyme.The potential impacts of this disassociation on the origin of the diplorhiny are also discussed from the molecular perspectives.Thus far,our study on the cranial anatomy of galeaspids,a 435-370-million-year-old ’ostracoderm’ group from China and northern Vietnam,has provided the earliest fossil evidence for the disassociation of nasohypophyseal complex in vertebrate phylogeny.Using Synchrotron Radiation X-ray Tomography,we further show some derivative structures of the trabeculae(e.g.orbitonasal lamina,ethmoid plate) in jawless galeaspids,which provide new insights into the reorganization of the vertebrate head before the evolutionary origin of the jaw.These anatomical observations based on new techniques highlight the possibility that galeaspids are,in many respects,a better proxy than osteostracans for reconstructing the pre-gnathostome condition of the rostral part of the braincase.The cranial anatomy of galeaspids reveals a number of derived characters uniquely shared with gnathostomes.This raises the potential possibility that galeaspids might be the closest jawless relatives of jawed vertebrates.Our study provides an intriguing example of intersection between developmental biology-based model and fossil evidence.     

蒙特卡罗方法研究集合种群动态

根据金堇蛱蝶的实际生活史和调查数据,以天为单位采用蒙特卡罗模拟方法仿真每个个体的发育、迁移、繁殖等随机行为. 从而获取集合种群及其各局域种群的动态变化,展示了局域种群的周转行为,得到了每年各斑块局域种群大小、占据率、被占据斑块数及相应的概率分布等信息. 计算结果表明该集合种群能够进入一个基本稳定的状态从而维持适当的种群规模并得以续存下去.我们还分析了斑块质量和所处地理位置对局域种群的影响. 提供了一种能够同时描述集合种群和局域种群动态的研究方法,为将来进一步研究各种影响集合种群动态的因素和制定保护策略等奠定了基础.     

Group formation stabilizes predator-prey dynamics

Theoretical ecology is largely founded on the principle of mass action, in which uncoordinated populations of predators and prey move in a random and well-mixed fashion across a featureless landscape. The conceptual core of this body of theory is the functional response, predicting the rate of prey consumption by individual predators as a function of predator and/or prey densities. This assumption is seriously violated in many ecosystems in which predators and/or prey form social groups. Here we develop a new set of group-dependent functional responses to consider the ecological implications of sociality and apply the model to the Serengeti ecosystem. All of the prey species typically captured by Serengeti lions (Panthera leo) are gregarious, exhibiting nonlinear relationships between prey-group density and population density. The observed patterns of group formation profoundly reduce food intake rates below the levels expected under random mixing, having as strong an impact on intake rates as the seasonal migratory behaviour of the herbivores. A dynamical system model parameterized for the Serengeti ecosystem (using wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) as a well-studied example) shows that grouping strongly stabilizes interactions between lions and wildebeest. Our results suggest that social groups rather than individuals are the basic building blocks around which predator-prey interactions should be modelled and that group formation may provide the underlying stability of many ecosystems.