Riccardo Pernice

🎉 Congrats! Best of luck.

02.11.2025 09:09 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Functional and Phylogenetic Structure of Forest Bird Assemblages Along an Afrotropical Elevational Gradient On Mt. Cameroon, functional richness and taxonomic diversity decreased with elevation, while functional nearest neighbor distance, functional evenness, and mean nearest taxon distance showed positive...

doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

With great pleasure, I announce that another chapter of my doctoral thesis has been published in @ecol-evol.bsky.social. In our study, we explored how bird diversity varies with altitude—taxonomically, functionally, and phylogenetically—on Mt. Cameroon

29.08.2025 18:25 — 👍 0    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

Aphrodite Fritillary in Michigan, a rapidly declining species of butterfly in the midwestern United States. CREDIT: Ronda Spink

Some 4.3 million observations of butterflies show that 59 of 136 species have declined in abundance over the past three decades, while no species has increased in abundance. Butterfly declines undoubtedly have large ecological consequences. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

18.08.2025 20:56 — 👍 29    🔁 18    💬 0    📌 1

Predicted reaction norms of costly and cheap traits. Schematic of reaction norms for two hypothetical traits: a metabolically cheap trait (e.g., a chemical toxin) with a continuous reaction norm (solid line) and a more expensive trait (e.g., trichome density) with a segmented reaction norm (dotted line). A hypothetical experiment with only two treatments (Control and Condition 1) might erroneously conclude that the segmented trait is fixed. Conversely, an experiment with stronger induction (Condition 2) would find no difference in inducibility between the two traits. By measuring trait values over a gradient of damage, the shapes of the reaction norms can be clearly distinguished. The organization of traits into continuous and threshold defenses may form a tiered defense system that balances cost savings with flexibility against variable threats.

Plants have limited resources for #defense. @ethanbass.bsky.social explores a @plosbiology.org study revealing how #plants limit costs by deploying cheap traits immediately, delaying spending on costly ones until a critical damage threshold is reached. Paper: plos.io/45iSFUd Primer: plos.io/45kLk6C

18.08.2025 08:27 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

‘Sex reversal' is surprisingly common in birds, new study suggests Survey of five Australian avians finds numerous discordant individuals, including a genetically male bird that had laid an egg

Scientists have found instances of sex reversal—where an individual has the physical features of one sex but the genetic makeup of the other—in five different Australian bird species. https://scim.ag/41Dvamo

15.08.2025 13:35 — 👍 77    🔁 15    💬 2    📌 3