Recent studies show that what, when and how a parasitic wasp learns is tailored to its specific ecological niche.

Consumer foraging behaviors are dynamic, changing in response to prey availability, seasonality, competition, and even the consumer’s physiological state. The isotopic composition of a consumer is a product of these factors as well as the isotopic “landscape” of its prey, i.e., the isotopic mixing space. Stable isotope mixing models are used to back-calculate the most likely proportional contri...

The Lepidoptera represent one of the most successful radiations of plant-feeding insects, which predominantly took place within angiosperms beginning in the Cretaceous period. Angiosperm colonization is thought to underlie the evolutionary success of the Lepidoptera because angiosperms provide an enormous range of niches for ecological speciation to take place. By contrast, the basal lepidopter...

This paper outlines a perspective on the future of AI, discussing directions for machines models human-like intelligence. We explain how developmental and evolutionary theories human cognition should further inform artificial emphasize role ecological niches in sculpting intelligent behavior, particular that intelligence was fundamentally shaped to adapt constantly changing socio-cultural envir...

The highly pathogenic avian influenza strain H5N1 was first detected in Europe in 2005, and has since been documented continent-wide in wild birds and poultry. However, the relative roles of each host group in transmission remain contentious. Using recently developed tools for analysis of ecological niches and geographic distributions of species, we compared ecological niche requirements for H5...

An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection-dominated regime (the niche phase) and a drift-dominated regime (the neutral phase). Simulations and analytic arguments show that the niche phase is favored in communities with large population s...

ModEco is a software package for ecological niche modeling. It integrates a range of niche modeling methods within a geographical information system. ModEco provides a user friendly platform that enables users to explore, analyze, and model species distribution data with relative ease. ModEco has several unique features: 1) it deals with different types of ecological observation data, such as p...