Chaitophorinae aphids are widespread across Eurasia and North America, and include some important agricultural and horticultural pests. So, accurate rapid species identification is very important. Here, we used three mitochondrial genes and one endosymbiont gene to calculate and analyze the genetic distances within different datasets. For species delimitation, two distance-based methods were em...

In this study, the genetic diversity of Iranian populations of two widespread Stenus species representing two ecomorphological forms, the "open living species" Stenus erythrocnemus Eppelsheim, 1884 and the "stratobiont" Stenus callidus Baudi di Selve, 1848, is presented using data from a fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene. We evaluate the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I haplotypes and th...

Intraspecific variation is abundant in all types of systematic characters but is rarely addressed in simulation studies of phylogenetic method performance. We compared the accuracy of 15 phylogenetic methods using simulations to (1) determine the most accurate method(s) for analyzing polymorphic data (under simplified conditions) and (2) test if generalizations about the performance of phylogen...

The barker frog Physalaemus cuvieri is widely distributed in South America and is found in all regions of Brazil. Significant intraspecific morphological variation in this species has been reported. To determine the genetic structure of the natural Brazilian populations of P. cuvieri, 10 different populations geographically separated by 99.41 to 2936.75 km were evaluated using 10 polymorphic mi...

Contemporary insights from evolutionary ecology suggest that population divergence in ecologically important traits within predators can generate diversifying ecological selection on local community structure. Many studies acknowledging these effects of intraspecific variation assume that local populations are situated in communities that are unconnected to similar communities within a shared r...

Understanding the mechanisms of community coexistence and ecosystem functioning may help to counteract the current biodiversity loss and its potentially harmful consequences. In recent years, plant-soil feedback that can, for example, be caused by below-ground microorganisms has been suggested to play a role in maintaining plant coexistence and to be a potential driver of the positive relations...

Effects of biodiversity on productivity are more likely to be expressed when there is greater potential for niche complementarity. In soil, chemically complex pools of nutrient resources should provide more opportunities for niche complementarity than chemically simple pools. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungal genotypes can exhibit substantial variation in nutrient acquisition traits and are key comp...

Intraspecific aggression represents a major source of mortality for many animals and is often experienced alongside the threat of predation. The presence of predators can strongly influence ecological systems both directly by consuming prey and indirectly by altering prey behavior or habitat use. As such, the threat of attack by higher level predators may strongly influence agonistic interactio...