Category: News

Sébastien and Cleo have published a study about international trade flows and ant invasions.

Summary:

Globalization has led to the unintentional movement of thousands of species around the world, necessitating a better understanding of how species are spread by international trade to prevent new invasions. However, to date, the evidence implicating global trade in intercontinental species flows has been mixed. Here, we show that commonly used proxies of global trade, such as general and agricultural imports, fail to explain the invasion flows of alien ants from donor regions to the continental US. Analysis of 97 individual commodity flows revealed instead that plant and fruit imports – a small subset of all agricultural commodities – were primarily associated with invasion flows of ants. The transport patterns of all 95 other commodities, including most “agricultural” commodities, differed from those of alien ants. Our findings highlight the need to determine precisely which commodities serve as introduction pathways for a particular taxon in or flows and identify likely source regions of future invasions in a world of evolving trade relationships.

Citation: Ollier, S. & Bertelsmeier, C. (2022) Precise knowledge of commodity trade is needed to understand invasion flows. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. doi:10.1002/fee.2509

Cleo was on a radio show talking about ants and her book on conflicts in insect societies (in French), 23.-27.05.2022.
There are 5 episodes of around 10-15 min:
Monday : https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/audio/les-fourmis-1-5-25825532.html

Tuesday :  https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/audio/les-fourmis-2-5-25825811.html

Wednesday : https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/audio/les-fourmis-3-5-25826131.html

Thursday : https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/audio/les-fourmis-4-5-25826382.html

Friday :  https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/audio/les-fourmis-5-5-25826672.html

Gyda and Cleo have published a study as part of an international research team a paper on the global biogeography of invasive moths and butterflies!

Summary:

Lepidoptera is a highly diverse, predominantly herbivorous insect order, with species transported to outside their native range largely facilitated by the global tradeof plants and plant-based goods. Analogous to island disharmony, we examine invasion disharmony, where species filtering during invasions increases systematic compositional differences between native and non-native species assemblages, and test whether some families are more successful at establishing in non-native regions than others. We compared numbers of non-native, unintentionally introduced Lepidoptera species with the land area of 11 regions worldwide. Differences among native and non-native assemblages in the distribution of species among families wereinvestigated using ordination analysis. We tested whether invasion disharmony is explained by propagule pressure (proxied by species richness in border interceptions) and if families were associated with specific trade commodities. Invasion disharmony in Lepidoptera appears to be driven by processes unrelated to the success of native assemblages. While native assemblages developed through long-term evolutionary radiation, the composition of non-native assemblages is driven by differential invasion pathways and traits affecting the establishment of founder populations that vary among families.
Citation:Mally R, Turner R, Blake R, Fenn-Moltu G, Bertelsmeier C, Brockerhoff E, Hoare R, Narhung H, Roques A, Puerswaran D, Yamanaka T, Liebhold A (2022) Moths and butterflies on alien shores: Global biogeography of non-native Lepidoptera. Journal of Biogeography, https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.14393

Cleo talked about our research on globalization and the spread of invasive species (in French) at the Collège de France in Paris. This seminar was for a general audience and part of the lecture series “Biodiversity dynamics and evolution” by Tatiana Giraud.

You can watch it here: link

Jelena, Sébastien and Cleo have published a study on thermoregulatory traits and climatic niches in Cataglyphis ants in collaboration with Spanish and French researchers. see Link.

Predictions of future species distributions rest on the assumption that climatic conditions in the current range reflect fundamental niche requirements. Here, we measured heat tolerance, chill coma recovery, body size and phylogenetic relationships in 19 desert specialist ants in the genus Cataglyphis to test if these important determinants of fundamental niches are good predictors of species realized niches. We modelled species climatic niches using 19 bioclimatic variables from WorldClim for recorded occurrence of each species. None of the determinants of the species’ fundamental niche were linked to their realized climatic niche, modelled using species distribution models. However, both heat tolerance and chill coma recovery were highly correlated with body size andall three thermoregulatory traits were phylogenetically constrained, suggesting they reflect fundamental requirements of each species.Thes results challenge the basic assumption of climatic niche modelling, that the realized niche can be used as a proxy for determining fundamental nicherequirements. These findings are particularly concerning for studies that use the species’ current realized niche to predict their responses to climate change.

Bujan, J., Ollier, S., Villalta, I., Devers, S., Cerdà, X., Amor, F., Dahbi, A., Bertelsmeier, C.*, Boulay, R.* (2022) Can thermoregulatory traits and evolutionary history predict climatic niches of thermal specialists? Diversity and Distributions,  http://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13511, *equal contribution