Evolutionary biologists tend to approach the study of the natural world within a framework of
adaptation, inspired perhaps by the power of natural selection to produce fitness …

Evolutionary quantitative genetics seeks to quantify sources of genetic variation in fitness-
related traits to assess the potential for traits to respond to future natural selection and to …

The social environment is both an important agent of selection for most organisms, and an
emergent property of their interactions. As an aggregation of interactions among members of …

In fluctuating environments, mothers may enhance the fitness of their offspring by adjusting
offspring phenotypes to match the environment they will experience at independence. In free …

Climate change is predicted to be most severe in northern regions and there has been much
interest in to what extent organisms can cope with these changes through phenotypic …

Adaptations to the cold and to short growing seasons characterize arctic life, but climate in
the Arctic is warming at an unprecedented rate. Will plant and animal populations of the …

Mast seeding, the intermittent, synchronous production of large seed crops by a population
of plants, is a well-known example of resource pulses that create lagged responses in …

Maternal effects are widespread and can have dramatic influences on evolutionary
dynamics, but their genetic basis has been measured rarely in natural populations. We used …

Background Our understanding of gut microbiota has been limited primarily to findings from
human and laboratory animals, but what shapes the gut microbiota in nature remains largely …

The potential importance of life history traits to population growth rates has been well
explored theoretically but has rarely been documented in wild mammals. In this study we …