Abstract Context Disentangling the effect of environment and biological interaction on community composition with observational data, within environmental filtering framework, is challenging because two processes produce non independent results. Objectives Adopting N-mixture models symmetric interactions, we aimed at estimating differential effects landscape structure biotic interactions local ...

Museum collections are critical to contemporary biological research, but museum acquisitions have declined in recent decades, hampering researchers’ ability to use collections to assess species responses to habitat modification, urbanization, and global climate change. Citizen science may be a key method to bolster museum collections data, particularly from urban regions, where ongoing data col...

We review postcopulatory phenomena in the Swedish sand lizard (Lacerta agilis) and adder (Vipera berus), and in particular, links between female promiscuity, determinants of paternity, and offspring viability. In both species, females mate multiply and exhibit a positive relationship between the number of partners and offspring viability. We conclude that this relationship is most likely the re...

Nine Burchell's and 6 Hartman's mountain zebras were culled during the 3 climatic periods characteristic of the Etosha National Park, South West Africa/Namibia, and were examined for helminths. The Burchell's zebras ranged in age from 4 1/2 to 19 years and the mountain zebras from 3 1/2 to 13 years. Twenty-five species of nematodes, belonging to the families Atractidae, Strongylidae, Oxyuridae,...

1 Società Italiana per la Storia della Fauna “G. Altobello”, Rome, Italy, 2 Museo Civico di Zoologia, Rome, Italy, 3 Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy, 4 Laboratoire d’Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France, 5 Department of Health, Life and Environmental Sciences,...

Understanding the background mechanisms affecting the emergence and maintenance of consistent between-individual variation within population in single (animal personality) or across multiple (behavioural syndrome) behaviours has key importance. State-dependence theory suggests that behaviour is 'anchored' to individual state (e.g. body condition, gender, age) and behavioural consistency emerges...

We investigated the respiratory metabolism of the overwintering lizard Lacerta vivipara while in either supercooled or frozen states. With a variable pressure and volume microrespirometer and a chromatograph, we show that the oxygen consumption of the supercooled animals showed a nonlinear relationship with temperature and an aerobic metabolism demand between 0.5 and -1.5 degrees C. A significa...

Most true lizards (Lacertidae) share a conservative karyotype, consisting of 18 pairs of macrochromosomes and one microchromosome pair. Homeologues of the microchromosome are present in other squamates and even in chickens. No structural autosomal microchromosome polymorphisms have been described previously in lizards. We found homozygous and heterozygous carriers of a microchromosome variant i...