Classical niche theory explains the coexistence of species through their exploitation of different resources. Assemblages of herbivores coexisting on a particular plant species are thus expected to be dominated by species from host-specific guilds with narrow, coexistence-facilitating niches rather than by species from generalist guilds. Exactly the opposite pattern is observed for folivores fe...

How do species divide resources to produce the characteristic species abundance distributions seen in nature? One way to resolve this problem is to examine how the biomass (or capacity) of the spatial guilds that combine to produce an abundance distribution is allocated among species. Here we argue that selection on body size varies across guilds occupying spatially distinct habitats. Using an ...

O ccupational guilds have been observed for thousands of years in many economies: ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; medieval and early modern India, Japan, Persia, Byzantium, and Europe; and nineteenth-century China, Latin America, and the Ottoman Empire. Guilds were most prevalent in manufacturing. Almost all urban craftsmen were guilded and, in parts of central and southern Europe, many rural ...

Large carnivores are important ecosystem components but are extinction prone due to small populations, slow growth rates and large area requirements. Consequently, there has been a surge of carnivore conservation efforts. Such efforts typically target local populations, with limited attention to the effects on the ecosystem function of predator guilds. Also, there is no framework for prioritizi...

The apprentice model is making a resurgence through online craft communities or virtual guilds. These groups are growing through the mainstreaming of computercontrolled manufacturing and the democratic sales channels of the internet. Similar to open-source software communities, virtual guilds have a pioneering role in championing new technologies, often with only niche applications. The future ...

Mutualistic interactions are diverse and widespread and often involve multispecies guilds of mutualists competing for access to one or more partner species. Despite the ubiquity of these interactions, we know little about the dynamics of competition and coexistence within these guilds or how interactions between mutualists and their shared resource (the partner species) may influence these dyna...

Guilds, a primary form of community in many online games, are thought to both aid gameplay and act as social entities. This work uses a three-year scrape of one game, World of Warcraft, to study the relationship between guild membership and advancement in the game as measured by character leveling, a defining and often studied metric. 509 guilds and 90,581 characters are included in the analysi...