Extant terrestrial biodiversity arguably is driven by the evolutionary success of angiosperm plants, but the evolutionary mechanisms and timescales of angiosperm-dependent radiations remain poorly understood. The Scarabaeoidea is a diverse lineage of predominantly plant- and dung-feeding beetles. Here, we present a phylogenetic analysis of Scarabaeoidea based on four DNA markers for a taxonomic...

Ecological restoration is being increasingly applied to reverse or mitigate biodiversity losses, re-instate ecological functions and increase the provision of ecosystem services in tropical forests. Effective assessment of the success of ecological restoration projects is critical in justifying the use of restoration, as well as improving best practice. However, there is often the assumption th...

Human presence and activity in tropical forest is thought to exert top-down regulation over the various 'green-world' pathways of plant-based foodwebs. However, these effects have never been explored for the 'brown-world' pathways of fecal-detritus webs. The strong effects of humans on tropical game mammals are likely to indirectly influence fecal detritivores (including Scarabaeine dung beetle...

In order to protect their food from competitors, ball-rolling dung beetles detach a piece of dung from a pile, shape it into a ball, and roll it away along a straight path [1]. They appear to rely exclusively on celestial compass cues to maintain their bearing [2-8], but the mechanism that enables them to use these cues for orientation remains unknown. Here, we describe the orientation strategy...

Male animals of many species deploy conditional reproductive strategies that contain distinct alternative phenotypes. Such facultatively expressed male tactics are assumed to be due to a single developmental threshold mechanism switching between the expression of two alternative phenotypes. However, we discovered a clade of dung beetles that commonly expresses two threshold mechanisms, resultin...

Given current accelerated trends of tropical land conversion, forest fragments are being incorporated into many conservation programs. For investing in fragments to be a viable conservation strategy, forest fragments must maintain their ecological integrity over the long term. Based on fieldwork in 22 forest fragments in the crater lakes region of western Uganda and in the continuous forest of ...

The coexistence of ecologically similar species (i.e. species utilizing the same resource) is a major topic in ecology. Communities are assembled either through the biotic interactions of ecologically similar species, e.g. competition, or by the abiotic separation of species along gradients of environmental conditions. Here, we investigated the temporal segregation, succession and seasonality o...

Understanding how biodiversity responds to environmental changes is essential to provide the evidence-base that underpins conservation initiatives. The present study provides a standardized comparison between unbaited flight intercept traps (FIT) and baited pitfall traps (BPT) for sampling dung beetles. We examine the effectiveness of the two to assess fire disturbance effects and how trap perf...