A new study -  which is the most comprehensive assessment to date of human influences on island biodiversity patterns - reveals that human activities have fundamentally reshaped biodiversity patterns on islands across the globe, providing important implications for how scientists understand ecology, evolution and conservation.

In mammals, males are usually stronger and more competitive than females. Males also show greater inequality in reproductive success – the number of offspring they produce – than females. In spotted hyenas, the opposite is true: reproductive inequality is greater in females than in males. The reason? Female spotted hyenas pass on their social rank and the associated privileges such as priority access to food to their offspring, whereas males do not. These are the findings of a new study on spotted hyenas spanning eight generations across eight clans in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, carried out by the Ngorongoro Hyena Project of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin (Leibniz-IZW) and the Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Montpellier (ISEM). The study is published in the journal “Science Advances” and may explain why females are the more competitive sex in some species.

Existing computer models used to guide decisions about energy infrastructure and contamination often treat microbes as fixed and unchanging, even though they constantly adapt to their surroundings. University of Maine researchers are aiming to close the gap by analyzing microbial genetic information using artificial intelligence to identify the biological processes that most strongly influence underground chemical reactions. Those insights will then be integrated into existing subsurface models, allowing scientists to better simulate how microbes, minerals and groundwater interact in changing environments.