Seasonal timing is studied by ecologists and physiologists alike and it is now widely recognized that further integration of these fields is needed for a full understanding of phenology. This is especially true in the light of the impact of global climate change on living organisms. In studies of avian reproduction, one obstacle to this integration is that ecologists and physiologists do not al...

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Reactive oxygen species (ROS)-induced damage on host cells and molecules has been considered the most likely proximal mechanism responsible for the age-related decline in organismal performance. Organisms have two possible ways to reduce the negative effect of ROS: disposing of effective antioxidant defenses and minimizing ROS production. The unbalance between the amount of ROS produced and the...

Recent developments in landscape-level ecological modeling rest upon poorly understood behavioral phenomena. Surprisingly, these phenomena include animal movement and habitat selection, two areas with a long history of study in behavioral ecology. A major problem in applying traditional behavioral ecology to landscape-level ecological problems is that ecologists and behaviorists work at very di...

S table isotope probing (SIP) is proving to be a powerful tool for molecular microbial ecologists, providing a culture-independent means of investigating populations that conduct particular metabolic processes in specific environments. Moreover, this alternative means for linking taxonomic identity with function may also assist microbiologists in developing strategies for isolating elusive micr...

Ecologists have proposed several incompatible definitions of ecological stability. Emulating physicists, mathematical ecologists commonly define it as Lyapunov stability. This formalizes the problematic concept by integrating it into a well-developed mathematical theory. The formalization also seems to capture the intuition that ecological stability depends on how ecological systems respond to ...

The decline of species in natural habitats concerns ecologists, who view extinction as a danger and conservation of biological diversity as a goal. In contrast, the proliferation of 'undesirable' species is the principal concern of epidemiologists, who view persistence as a problem and eradication as an achievement. While ecologists and epidemiologists have essentially opposite goals, the mathe...

During the last decade, ecologists and particularly mathematical ecologists have focused on different approaches to the problem of spatial distribution of species. When the spatial distribution is not considered explicitly, the mathematical models are called spatially implicit. They consider the proportion of territory occupied by given species, but there is no information on which particular s...