Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

Protein synthesis declines with age across many tissues, but whether this decline actively contributes to physiological aging remains unclear. Oocytes may be particularly vulnerable because they rely ...

It has long been recognized that male mating competition is responsible for the evolution of weaponry for mate acquisition. However, when females m...

Sequencing of species that can be cultured in the laboratory results in a bias in taxon sampling. This study uses cost-effective, amplification-free, low-input sequencing methods to assemble genomes…

This article introduces organismic agency as the principle of individual selection. Individual selection involves the organism itself selecting a behavior or development according to individual prefer...

Fish have "designed" their perfect partners in a new experiment—revealing simple male preferences and more complex female tastes.

Abstract. Same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) occurs across many animal taxa. Some instances of SSB likely arise from animals’ mating indiscriminately and/or wi

Every cell in an organism contains the same DNA, which carries all the instructions needed for it to function. Yet cells do not all use the same genes: A nerve cell, for example, does not activate the same genes as a muscle cell.

Mutations in the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) play a critical role in the aging process and a wide variety of age-related diseases. However, it remains unclear when the mutations that drive physiologi...

Isotope tracing is used to determine the fate of larval dietary amino acids in adult flies, and identifies Lsp2 as a key regulator of translation and lifespan that forms the molecular basis of the eff...

Abstract. Stabilizing selection commonly acts on complex traits that affect individual fitness. Here, we relate mean fitness under stabilizing selection to

Behavioral differences among groups can have profound impacts on individual fitness,1 yet how group-level phenotypes arise and change during developme…

Telomeres have the crucial role of protecting chromosome ends and its length varies significantly between organisms. What evolutionary factor shapes this natural variation has been a long standing que...

Using two-photon imaging in behaving fruit flies, we find that visual threat evokes distinct behavioral responses associated with characteristic brain-wide changes in neural activity. Action selection is biased by unique neural activity patterns prior to stimulus presentation, with signals in a region within the central brain predicting future behavior.

A fruit-fly protein thought only to store amino acids in fact responds to nutritional deficiency in both development and adulthood, resulting in lifespan extension.

Abstract. Evolutionary trajectories are determined by selection and the underlying genetic architecture of additive genetic variances and covariances for t

Scientists are poking holes in established ideas about how cells live and die, and are harnessing these discoveries to fight diseases from cancer to autoimmune conditions.

Leveraging the Drosophila male whole-brain connectome, Rubin et al. describe an expansive and highly intertwined male-specific network poised to control male social behaviors. They construct genetic driver lines for specific, sexually dimorphic cell types. Optogenetic manipulations reveal cell-type-specific contributions to social behaviors and insights into underlying circuit mechanisms.

When studying a complex system, it is often useful to think of the system as a network of interacting units. One can then ask if some properties of...

David Reznick, Joseph Travis, Ronald Bassar This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here. Life history theory assumes that the optimal life hist…

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

The fitness of an organism determines its likelihood of succeeding in short-term competition, but many other factors can influence its long-term success. In this study, we investigate the relative con...

Paul Huber, Floyd Betz, Saskia Cordes, Hannah Charlotte Hoffmann, Enna Lucile Klinghammer, Sandra Steiger This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be foun…

Abstract. Recombination diversifies offspring genomes and helps ensure chromosome segregation during meiosis. Mutation rates are elevated near crossovers d

Healthy aging has long been associated with impairments in learning from rewards. However, typical paradigms do not adequately distinguish between being motivated by information to learn about the world and being motivated by rewarding outcomes from our decisions. The present study describes how these distinct motivations guide learning about the environment across the lifespan. Participants (N=169; ages 18-71 [M=39, SD=15.4]) completed a task based on the board game Battleship, making sequential choices about which tile to uncover on a grid with the goal of finding and learning hidden shapes. While older adults performed worse on the task in terms of overall score, their search behavior stabilized earlier. Older adults also preferred to seek information over reward, spreading their choices more widely, making more choices per trial, and acquiring more information per trial. Additionally, older adults showed a persistent reliance on information gained from the outcomes of their choices. These findings suggest that, as individuals age, they prefer to seek information, which earns them fewer points and slows learning but incurs no cost to long-run projected performance. Despite the conventional view linking age with diminished learning, in a complex environment that disentangled information and reward, older adults remained engaged with no projected learning deficits. Our findings challenge assumptions about cognitive decline in aging and reframe information seeking in older adults as a persistent motivational preference that need not serve learning, raising the question of why the drive to seek information intensifies with age even when it confers no advantage.