The study included 3,971,083 reported cases and 661 deaths across all 31 provincial-level administrative regions. Investigators used Joinpoint regression to assess long-term trends, time-series decomposition to quantify seasonality, and global Moran’s I and Local Indicators of Spatial Association, or LISA, to assess spatial autocorrelation and local clusters. They also evaluated six forecasting models for each province: a neural network, exponential smoothing with state-space models, seasonal autoregressive integrated moving-average models, a hybrid model, a Bayesian structural time-series model and Prophet. Model performance was compared through a composite standardised index.

Incidence declined throughout the study period, and the estimated rate of decline accelerated after 2017. Joinpoint analysis estimated an annual percentage change of minus 11.47 for 2004–2017 and minus 18.85 for 2017–2020. The timing of seasonal peaks remained relatively stable from year to year, although the amplitude of those peaks decreased. These results distinguish a continuing reduction in the overall burden from a largely unchanged annual seasonal pattern.

Spatial clustering was statistically significant during 2004–2019 and weakened to its lowest level in 2020, although the significance of the 2020 result depended on the spatial-weight specification used. Beijing and Tianjin had the highest incidence of bacillary dysentery, while southwestern provinces had a higher burden of amoebic dysentery. The analysis also found that children aged zero to one year accounted for the largest single-year age-band share, at 13.1% of cases. Because the study used aggregated surveillance data, it could not examine individual exposures or separate the effects of specific interventions, changes in care-seeking and reporting, and other influences on observed incidence.

For the pandemic-period comparison, province-specific forecasting models were trained on data from 2004–2019 and used to generate pre-pandemic baselines for 2020. Observed national incidence was then compared with the combined provincial projections. In six provinces, reported incidence fell below the lower bound of the corresponding 95% prediction interval, indicating that the reduction exceeded the range expected from the pre-existing trend and seasonal models. The overall deviation coincided temporally with COVID-19 control measures, but the observational design supports an association rather than a causal conclusion. The results show that the national decrease in 2020 was accompanied by persistent seasonality, geographic clustering and provincial disparities, with the strongest reductions in some regions and less uniform departures from baseline elsewhere.

Subject of Research: Spatiotemporal surveillance and forecasting of dysentery incidence in mainland China, 2004–2020

Article Title: Dysentery in Mainland China, 2004–2020: spatiotemporal dynamics and changes during the COVID-19 pandemic period

Article References: Ma, H., Ke, D., Xu, M., Zhou, X., Lei, Z., Huang, B., Liu, Q., & Lei, Z. (2026). Dysentery in Mainland China, 2004–2020: spatiotemporal dynamics and changes during the COVID-19 pandemic period. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29811-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29811-x

Keywords: dysentery, China, disease surveillance, COVID-19 measures, time-series forecasting, spatial clustering, seasonality, bacillary dysentery, amoebic dysentery, Mainland, spatiotemporal, dynamics

Researchers from the University of Neuchâtel and partner institutions collected 104 soil samples along five elevation gradients in two distant mountain ranges, the Spanish Sierra Nevada and the Swiss Alps, spanning two distinct biogeographic regions. Sampling took place in 2019 at 52 sites in forests and grasslands below the treeline, with every site visited twice — once in spring and once in summer. This design allowed the team to directly compare the magnitude of spatial turnover in protist communities against the magnitude of seasonal change, a question that has rarely been addressed for soil microeukaryotes across multiple gradients.

The methodological backbone of the study was environmental DNA metabarcoding. The team extracted DNA from roughly a gram of sieved soil, amplified the hypervariable V4 region of the 18S rRNA gene with universal eukaryotic primers, and sequenced the products on an Illumina MiSeq platform. After stringent quality filtering, chimera removal, error-model-based inference of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), and a dedicated procedure to detect and correct tag-jumps — sequencing artifacts in which reads are assigned to the wrong sample — the final dataset contained more than 6.5 million cleaned reads representing nearly 20,000 eukaryotic ASVs. Of these, 11,706 ASVs were assigned to protists, with rarefaction curves indicating that sequencing depth had reached saturation for every sample regardless of region, habitat, or season.

The taxonomic picture was dominated by Cercozoa, a phylum of predominantly predatory and bacterivorous amoebae and flagellates, which contributed 4,445 ASVs and the largest share of reads. Ciliophora (1,725 ASVs), Apicomplexa (1,176 ASVs), the amoeboid group traditionally labeled Lobosa (1,131 ASVs), Conosa (968 ASVs), and Chlorophyta (488 ASVs) followed. The strong showing of Apicomplexa, a group famous for animal parasites such as the malaria agent Plasmodium, most likely reflects the pervasive parasitism of soil animals, a signal that has been increasingly recognized in environmental sequencing surveys. Green algae of the phylum Chlorophyta were more abundant in open grasslands than under forest canopies, consistent with their phototrophic lifestyle.

To quantify the relative roles of space and time, the authors decomposed total (gamma) diversity into three additive components: local alpha diversity, temporal beta diversity (the turnover of ASVs between spring and summer at the same plot), and spatial beta diversity (the turnover among plots within a habitat and region). The result was unambiguous. In the Swiss Alps, spatial turnover accounted for an average of 85.06 percent of total diversity, compared with just 3.84 percent for temporal turnover. In the Spanish Sierra Nevada the corresponding figures were 70.40 percent versus 14.17 percent. Local alpha diversity contributed the remainder and, except in Sierra Nevada grasslands, always exceeded the temporal component.

Ordination and statistical testing reinforced this hierarchy. Non-metric multidimensional scaling of Bray-Curtis dissimilarities revealed four distinct sample clusters separated along two axes: one splitting forests from grasslands and the other separating the Sierra Nevada from the Alps. Season, by contrast, left no visible imprint. A permutational analysis of variance confirmed that community composition differed significantly between regions and habitats and, to a lesser degree, across elevations, while the temporal variable and all its interactions were statistically non-significant. Variance partitioning showed that space, soil properties, and climate together explained 29 percent of community variation, whereas season alone explained none, contributing only about 3 percent in combination with the other factors.

The team then zoomed in on four of the most species-rich protist groups — Cercozoa, Ciliophora, Apicomplexa, and Lobosa — each exceeding 1,000 ASVs, to test whether the whole-community pattern held at finer taxonomic resolution. It did. None of the four groups showed significant seasonal shifts in alpha diversity indices, ordinations separated samples by habitat and region but not season, and diversity partitioning for every group showed spatial beta diversity dwarfing temporal turnover. The sole exception was Ciliophora, for which season explained a minor portion of community composition, yet even here the overarching pattern of spatial dominance remained intact.

The environmental drivers of community composition also proved temporally stable. Redundancy analyses with forward selection identified the same set of edaphic predictors in spring and summer within each region, even though the explanatory power of individual variables varied between seasons. In the Spanish Sierra Nevada, elevation and a composite variable combining soil organic matter, organic carbon, organic nitrogen, and residual humidity were the significant predictors, the latter likely reflecting the capacity of organic particles to retain water. In the Swiss Alps, soil pH, the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, the nitrogen-to-phosphorus ratio, and bioavailable phosphorus emerged as key drivers — variables tied to organic matter turnover and nutrient cycling. That different sets of predictors operated in the two regions underscores how bedrock, climate, and vegetation jointly shape belowground communities, while their consistency across seasons within each region strengthens confidence in single-visit sampling.

Why does this matter beyond the world of protist ecology? Microorganisms divide far faster than plants and animals, so ecologists have long worried that microbial communities might fluctuate seasonally enough to confound comparisons among studies conducted at different times of year. If temporal turnover matched or exceeded spatial turnover, a survey of one mountain range sampled in May could not legitimately be compared with another sampled in July. The new findings lift that constraint for temperate mountain ecosystems: sampling once at any point between late spring and late summer should not bias beta diversity comparisons across elevation gradients, regions, or habitats. Given that logistical and financial realities frequently restrict large-scale and global sampling campaigns to a single visit per site, this is genuinely good news for the design of macroecological studies of soil life.

The authors also note important caveats. Their conclusions apply to temperate climates and to the spring–summer window; harsher seasons were excluded because snow cover, road access, and safety make winter and autumn sampling impractical at high elevations, even though snow insulates soils and allows microbial activity to continue beneath it. Hot, dry summer spells can sharply reduce protist abundance and activity, and drought sensitivity varies among protist groups, so climate change could rewrite the seasonal rules the study establishes. The findings may also not transfer to other climates or latitudes, and the eDNA-based approach has yet to be systematically validated against traditional microscopy for seasonal dynamics of soil protists. Moreover, the analyses did not cover phototrophic protists, which play important roles in grasslands. Still, as a baseline for a component of biodiversity long relegated to the margins of biogeography, the study’s message is clear and actionable: in Europe’s temperate mountains, the identity of a soil protist community is written primarily by its place on the landscape — its elevation, habitat, and soil chemistry — not by the calendar. Researchers planning large-scale soil biodiversity surveys can now schedule their fieldwork with one less worry, and conservation assessments of mountain biodiversity gain a firmer foundation for comparing sites across regions and seasons.

Subject of Research: Spatial versus seasonal beta diversity of soil protist communities along elevation gradients in the Swiss Alps and Spanish Sierra Nevada

Article Title: Higher spatial than seasonal beta diversity of soil protists along elevation gradients

Article References: Bruni, E. P., Lorite, J., Peñas, J., Mulot, M., Fournier, B., Vittoz, P., Mitchell, E. A. D., & Lentendu, G. (2024). Higher spatial than seasonal beta diversity of soil protists along elevation gradients. Frontiers of Biogeography, 17, Article e132637. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.17.132637

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.21425/fob.17.132637

Keywords: soil protists, beta diversity, elevation gradients, environmental DNA, metabarcoding, Swiss Alps, Sierra Nevada, seasonality, biogeography, Cercozoa, soil microbiology, mountain ecology

The research, led by a team studying shallow groundwater aquifers across Switzerland, set out to determine whether the tiny animals living in groundwater show seasonal patterns of occurrence and abundance, and how reliably they can be detected at all. This matters because groundwater ecosystems remain among the least studied habitats on the planet, despite harboring remarkable endemic species, some descended from ancient adaptive radiations. Without baseline knowledge of temporal dynamics, monitoring programs cannot distinguish genuine population trends from mere sampling noise, and groundwater fauna is notably absent from Switzerland’s national biodiversity monitoring programs.

The study relied on an unusually scalable sampling method built around the country’s drinking water infrastructure. Researchers enlisted drinking water providers through a citizen science project, asking them to attach fine filter nets with a mesh size of 0.8 millimeters to the pipe inlets of spring catchment boxes, where groundwater is passively captured before entering the supply system. After one week of filtering, all captured organisms were collected and preserved in 80 percent ethanol. This passive approach turned hundreds of existing water extraction sites into ready-made biological monitoring stations, requiring no drilling, no expensive equipment, and no specialized expertise from the volunteers who installed the nets.

Two datasets formed the backbone of the analysis. The first covered 17 inlets spread across Switzerland, sampled approximately monthly from May 2021 to April 2022, with organisms identified to major taxonomic groups. The researchers split the catch into three categories: groundwater amphipods of the genera Niphargus and Crangonyx, groundwater isopods including the genus Proasellus, and a residual group of other macroinvertebrates consisting mostly of stygophiles and stygoxenes, organisms that visit groundwater only occasionally or accidentally. The second dataset was far denser spatially: 143 inlets in the catchment of the river Töss, each sampled one to ten times in consecutive weeks during spring 2021, with all amphipods identified to species level by sequencing the Folmer fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene.

The statistical treatment was correspondingly rigorous. The team applied Generalized Additive Models with cyclic cubic regression splines to capture seasonality as day of year, thin plate splines for outflow rate and precipitation, and a random effect for each inlet, fitting models with a negative binomial response distribution using restricted maximum likelihood. Crucially, they ran two versions of the model, one standardizing abundance per volume of water filtered and one per duration of sampling, because the choice of offset can fundamentally alter what a monitoring program concludes. Detection rates in the weekly dataset were calculated from capture histories at each inlet, and the researchers then tested how those estimates changed as the minimum number of sampling occasions per site increased.

The headline result is striking in its simplicity: obligate groundwater amphipods and isopods showed no significant seasonal pattern in abundance, while the other macroinvertebrates peaked sharply in July, a pattern driven largely by larvae of mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, the so-called EPT taxa whose life cycles are tied to surface waters. In other words, the true groundwater specialists are temporally consistent, whereas the surface visitors wax and wane with the seasons. Precipitation showed no significant effect on any group, though the authors caution that its influence may be confounded with seasonality or masked by aquifer-specific time lags determined by local geology. Outflow rate mattered only when abundances were standardized per megaliter, with predicted densities highest at low flows, a possible dilution effect suggesting that organism density is largely independent of discharge.

Temporal autocorrelation added another layer of insight. Presence-absence of groundwater amphipods was significantly correlated across samples up to three months apart, and isopods up to ten months, consistent with the slow life histories and limited mobility of stygobites. For monitoring design, this means that samples clustered within a short window are not independent: a string of false absences in quick succession could badly skew an assessment. The authors recommend spreading sampling occasions evenly throughout the year rather than concentrating them, and they note that extending filter periods from one week to several could raise capture rates, though at the cost of specimen decomposition that hampers both morphological and molecular identification.

The detection rate analysis revealed a sobering picture for anyone hoping to confirm the presence or absence of groundwater amphipods with a quick survey. In the Töss catchment, amphipods appeared at 55 percent of the 143 inlets, but nine species were identified and five of them occurred at only one to three sites each, a pattern typical of groundwater communities dominated by rare, narrowly distributed species. Among the four widespread species, detection rates varied enormously between inlets, ranging from 0.1 to 1.0 for amphipods combined. Niphargus fontanus and N. tonywhitteni stabilized around mean detection rates of roughly 0.37 and 0.3 once six or more samples per inlet were available, but N. auerbachi never stabilized, and Crangonyx cf. subterraneus converged toward the study’s lower detection limit of 0.1, implying its true detectability is even lower.

These numbers translate directly into sampling requirements. Using the lowest mean detection rate for amphipods combined, about 0.38, the researchers calculated that a minimum of 6.3 samples would be needed to infer absence with 95 percent probability at an average site. But because detection varies so much between inlets, a site with a detection rate of 0.1 would demand 29 samples to reach the same confidence. The authors also acknowledge that by analyzing only sites where species were present, without modeling the occurrence process, they likely overestimated true detection rates, meaning the real sampling burden could be heavier still. They stress that these estimates are region-specific and may not transfer to mountainous areas or other regions with different amphipod communities.

The study’s practical recommendations are clear: standardize sampling effort by filtering duration rather than discharge volume, space sampling occasions evenly across the year, and design region-specific strategies that account for the heterogeneity in detection among species and sites. Scaling such monitoring to national levels remains a challenge, but the authors see promise in combining approaches, pairing citizen science filternet sampling with environmental DNA metabarcoding, which integrates biodiversity over larger spatial and temporal scales even though it has so far proven less effective than direct filtration at detecting groundwater amphipods. As biodiversity decline extends into the planet’s hidden aquifers, this research makes the case that conserving subterranean life begins with knowing when, where, and how hard to look.

Subject of Research: Temporal consistency and spatial variability in the detection of macroinvertebrates from shallow groundwater aquifers

Article Title: Temporal consistency and spatial variability in detection: implications for monitoring of macroinvertebrates from shallow groundwater aquifers

Article References: Knüsel, M., Alther, R., Couton, M., & Altermatt, F. (2024). Temporal consistency and spatial variability in detection: implications for monitoring of macroinvertebrates from shallow groundwater aquifers. Subterranean Biology, 49, 139-161. https://doi.org/10.3897/subtbiol.49.132515

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/subtbiol.49.132515

Keywords: groundwater, stygobites, amphipods, biodiversity monitoring, detection probability, citizen science, aquifers, seasonality, Niphargus, macroinvertebrates, Switzerland, Subterranean Biology

Speleomantes are a biological oddity in Europe. The genus comprises eight species, all endemic or sub-endemic to Italy, and they are the only members of the lungless salamander family Plethodontidae on the continent, a group otherwise dominated by North American lineages. Being entirely terrestrial with direct development, these salamanders skip the aquatic larval stage familiar from most amphibians. Their skin does the breathing, which makes them exquisitely sensitive to temperature and moisture. Cool, humid conditions are essential not only for respiration and osmoregulation but also for the proper development of their eggs, and such conditions appear on the surface only briefly in spring and autumn. Caves, by contrast, offer them year-round.

This dependence on microclimate has long made cave salamanders a textbook example of a troglophile, an organism that thrives in subterranean habitats without being fully committed to them. What has been missing, the researchers note, is evidence on abundance. Most ecological work on Speleomantes has focused simply on where the animals are present or absent, leaving open the question of which factors determine how many individuals actually congregate in a given spot. To close that gap, the team designed a study to test three competing ideas, which they framed as the microclimatic selection hypothesis, the best foraging hypothesis, and the predation risk hypothesis.

The fieldwork drew on a previously published dataset collected between October 2015 and June 2016 in seven caves in the Monte Albo massif of northeastern Sardinia. A single researcher carried out 77 surveys, at least two per season, working inward from each cave entrance in three-meter sectors. Every sector was searched for a standardized 7.5 minutes, with all salamanders counted and, where possible, captured for measurement. At the far end of each sector, the team logged air temperature and relative humidity at ground level and at 2.5 meters height, capturing potential microclimatic stratification, along with maximum and minimum illuminance. Sex was determined for captured adults using the mental gland, a male secondary sexual trait, while individuals below 55 millimeters in snout-vent length were classed as juveniles.

The surveys also recorded four cave invertebrates. Crane flies and the snail Oxychilus oppressus were treated as potential prey, while two spiders, the orb-web species Meta bourneti and a Tegenaria species, were treated as potential predators, since both have been documented eating juvenile salamanders. Some 110 salamanders were marked with visual implant tags, but only ten were recaptured over the year, a rate low enough that the authors treat the dataset as a genuine snapshot of population preferences rather than the habits of a few familiar individuals.

Statistical modeling with generalized linear mixed models revealed how dramatically the cave microclimate shifts with the calendar. Sector temperature was significantly lower in winter and spring than in autumn, and the depth profile flipped seasonally: near the entrances, temperatures ran hot in summer, while deeper sectors were relatively warmer in winter. Over a year, temperature in the deepest zones, around 60 to 75 meters from the entrance, fluctuated by only about 5 degrees Celsius, whereas the first 15 meters inside the caves swung by nearly 20 degrees. Humidity generally increased with depth and dropped in spring and summer, while illuminance peaked near entrances, especially in spring.

Against this backdrop, the salamanders’ behavior supported the microclimatic selection hypothesis most clearly. Overall abundance was significantly lower in summer and winter and showed no decline in spring, and individuals clustered in relatively cold, humid sectors not far from the entrances. During the stressful summer months, however, the animals shifted deeper into the caves, where stable conditions persist all year. The best foraging hypothesis was partially supported. Overall abundance was positively linked to the presence of crane flies, and juveniles in particular favored entrance zones where prey availability is highest, apparently accepting sub-optimal microclimates in exchange for food. Adults showed no significant correlation with prey presence, and the authors suggest this may reflect the limits of their data, which recorded only the presence of two prey types rather than their abundance, in a species known to forage opportunistically.

The predation risk hypothesis, by contrast, was not supported at all. No group of salamanders reduced its numbers where the predator spiders were present, and the analysis actually produced positive correlations, with adult males more abundant in sectors occupied by both Meta bourneti and Tegenaria, and juveniles more numerous where Meta bourneti and the snail Oxychilus oppressus occurred. The researchers interpret this as likely reflecting the salamander’s position at the top of the cave food web. Meta spiders, they note, are considered a good proxy for prey availability in subterranean environments, so the association may be indirect. As for documented spider predation on juveniles, the recorded cases involved animals that apparently blundered into webs, suggesting the true risk is lower than the hypothesis predicted.

The seasonal pattern also carried a foraging logic. In winter, when invertebrate abundance in surface environments crashes, adults appear to have little incentive to leave the stable depths of the cave for prey-poor entrance zones. In spring, by contrast, conditions near entrances become mild and prey-rich, and the counts reflected it: 524 of the year’s 831 observed salamanders were recorded in that single season, compared with just 60 in winter.

This is the first study to identify the ecological factors influencing abundance in Speleomantes flavus, and its conclusion is that microclimatic suitability is the dominant driver, followed by the presence of particular invertebrate species. The authors stress that their results are preliminary and call for future work measuring actual prey and predator abundances rather than mere presence, and for testing the same hypotheses across other populations and the remaining species of the genus. For now, the picture that emerges is of a lungless predator quietly tracking the rhythm of the seasons through a twilight world, gathering where the air is cool, the walls are damp, and the food is close.

Subject of Research: Ecological drivers of seasonal abundance in the endemic Monte Albo cave salamander Speleomantes flavus

Article Title: Seasonal abundance of the Monte Albo cave salamander Speleomantes flavus in Italy

Article References: Coppari, L., & Lunghi, E. (2025). Seasonal abundance of the Monte Albo cave salamander Speleomantes flavus in Italy. Subterranean Biology, 51, 103-114. https://doi.org/10.3897/subtbiol.51.141075

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/subtbiol.51.141075

Keywords: Speleomantes flavus, cave salamander, Monte Albo, Sardinia, subterranean ecology, microclimate, abundance, Plethodontidae, seasonality, cave invertebrates, predation risk, troglophile

The research focused on three families of ground-hunting spiders: Ctenidae, Lycosidae, and Zodariidae. These spiders are ideal subjects for restoration monitoring because their habitat preferences are well documented. Wolf spiders of the family Lycosidae tend to favor open habitats, while many Ctenidae and Zodariidae are characteristic of tropical forests. Because spiders are dominant predators in terrestrial arthropod food webs, sensitive to environmental change, and providers of essential ecosystem services such as pest control and nutrient cycling, shifts in their populations can signal broader changes in ecosystem functioning. In West Africa, where most spider species have yet to be formally described, achieving species-level identification required visits to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium and the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Germany, where original type specimens were examined.

The study compared five land-use types across the dry and wet seasons of 2019: the Asukese Forest Reserve as a primary natural forest reference, the Bosomkese Forest Reserve as an agroforestry system, the Terchire Restoration Area as an actively restored forest, a nearby arable field cultivated with maize, plantain, cassava and cocoa, and an unrestored gravel site colonized by shrubby plants such as Chromolaena odorata and Pennisetum purpureum. The restored forest covers 15.4 hectares and was replanted in 1999 with indigenous and fast-growing exotic nitrogen-fixing tree seedlings after gravel extraction for road construction ended. Eight replicated plots of 20 by 20 meters were established at each site, and five pitfall traps per plot were emptied weekly for ten weeks in each season, yielding a total catch of 1,852 individual spiders across all sites and seasons.

The results were striking. Overall activity density, which counts both juvenile and adult specimens, was highest in the restored forest, followed by the natural forest. Activity density was higher in the dry season than in the wet season across sites, and the interaction between land use and season was statistically significant. The restored forest reached its peak activity density in the dry season, while the arable field recorded its lowest values in the wet season. This pattern suggests that the complex vegetation structure, stable microclimate, and abundant prey availability of forested habitats support larger spider populations than open or agricultural land uses, where pesticides and tillage may reduce spider numbers through direct mortality and indirectly by reducing prey availability.

However, the inverse Simpson index, a measure sensitive to changes in the most abundant species in a community, told a different tale. The highest diversity values were recorded on the gravel site in the wet season, followed by the gravel site in the dry season and the natural forest in both seasons. The restored forest showed lower diversity values, indicating the dominance of very few spider species. The species Pardosa injucunda and Trochosa gentilis dominated the restored forest communities, while Africactenus monitor dominated the natural forest and Hogna gratiosa dominated the gravel site. This dominance structure in the restored forest may reflect its transitional state, where a mix of species from both open and forest habitats coexist but few achieve high abundance.

Community composition analysis using non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a clear gradient from the gravel site through the arable field, agroforestry system, and restored forest to the natural forest. Spider communities in the agroforestry system overlapped substantially with those in the restored forest, suggesting that the replanted forest has developed a community more similar to managed agroforestry than to primary natural forest. The natural forest supported a unique community characterized by Mallinella species and Africactenus monitor, typical forest-dwelling spiders associated with old forest stands, deadwood, and diverse tree communities. The gravel site supported specialized open-habitat species such as Hogna gratiosa and Mallinella bandamaensis, adapted to hunting prey in degraded environments.

The restored forest community contained a mix of species from different land-use types. Mallinella sp3, Pardosa injucunda, and Trochosa gentilis, which characterized the restored forest, were also observed in the natural forest, agroforestry system, and arable field respectively. This reflects the developmental stage of the restored forest, which mimics spider communities from both the historical pre-restoration gravel site and the reference natural forest. The communities in the restored forest differed by 68 percent from the gravel site and by 61 percent from the natural forest, confirming an intermediate state between these land uses. Seasonal differences in species composition showed only a statistical trend, with the wet season characterized by higher activity densities of Hogna duala, Hogna gratiosa, Pardosa injucunda, and Trochosa gentilis.

The findings carry significant implications for restoration practice in Ghana and across tropical regions. Ghana loses an estimated 3.5 percent of its total forest area per year, equivalent to roughly 315,000 hectares, driven by agricultural expansion, logging, mining, and infrastructure development. Restoration monitoring in Ghana has historically focused on tree species composition and soil attributes, with little attention to arthropod biodiversity. This study demonstrates the value of species-level identification in ecological monitoring, as species within higher taxonomic groups often have different ecological traits and may respond differently to habitat changes. The results confirm that active restoration is effective at increasing spider activity densities and is certainly more effective from a conservation point of view than leaving degraded systems unmanaged and unable to self-recover.

Yet the study also reveals the trade-offs in restoration objectives. After twenty years, the natural forest biodiversity of ground-hunting spiders was not achieved in the actively restored forest. The community composition remained more similar to the agroforestry system than to the natural forest, likely because restoration approaches that also aimed to provide direct benefits to local human communities created habitat conditions that favor certain species over others. The unique habitat conditions of the natural forest, characterized by old forest stands, deadwood, and a diverse tree community, appear to require much longer timeframes to develop than two decades of active replanting can provide. These results highlight both the benefits of restoring former mining sites and the patience that true biodiversity recovery demands, as restoration strategies must balance conservation goals with the needs of local communities who depend on ecosystem goods and services from restored landscapes.

Subject of Research: Ground spider community responses to active post-mining forest restoration in Ghana

Article Title: Active restoration of post-mining forest benefits the activity density, but not the diversity of spider communities across the seasons in Ghana

Article References: Kinga, H., Damptey, F. G., Harms, D., Jocqué, R., Henrard, A., & Birkhofer, K. (2025). Active restoration of post-mining forest benefits the activity density, but not the diversity of spider communities across the seasons in Ghana. African Invertebrates, 66(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3897/afrinvertebr.66.138662

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/afrinvertebr.66.138662

Keywords: forest restoration, spiders, Ghana, post-mining, biodiversity, activity density, species composition, seasonality, tropical ecology, bioindicators, Ctenidae, Lycosidae

The site of Roseldorf lies about 70 kilometers northwest of Vienna, on the plateau and southern slope of the Sandberg hill. Covering roughly 38 hectares, it dates to the La Tène period and has been interpreted as a large central settlement. Within the northern part of the settlement, archaeologists identified cult district 2, containing two square enclosures labeled Objects 40 and 41, both interpreted as so-called Small Sanctuaries. The new research focuses on the animal remains recovered from the trenches of these two enclosures, comparing them with material already studied from the settlement itself and from the Great Sanctuary, Object 1, in cult district 1.

The assemblages differ strikingly in size and composition. Object 40 yielded 119 faunal remains weighing 2,739 grams, while Object 41 produced 1,050 remains weighing 6,228 grams. In Object 40, nearly all identified specimens belonged to domesticated species, with cattle dominating at 67.3 percent by specimen count and 81.6 percent by weight, followed by horse at 24.6 percent. Only two fragments, belonging to the European hare, represented wild animals. Object 41 told a very different story: pigs accounted for a remarkable 78 percent of identified specimens, while cattle made up 17.7 percent, and chicken appeared for the first time in the ritual record with two specimens. No wild species were identified there at all.

The age profiles of the slaughtered animals proved equally revealing. In the settlement, cattle were typically slaughtered at an older age, beyond seven years, after a lifetime of secondary exploitation for milk, labor, and breeding. In Objects 40 and 41, by contrast, the available teeth and epiphyseal fusion data indicate that cattle were mainly killed as young adults, between roughly three and seven years old, suggesting an emphasis on prime meat quality rather than economic efficiency. Sex estimation based on metapodial bones showed that castrated individuals predominated among the adult cattle in both enclosures, a pattern also seen in the settlement and the Great Sanctuary.

The pig remains from Object 41 were the most surprising of all. Epiphyseal analysis showed that 96.3 percent of the pig individuals were non-adult, a stark contrast to the settlement record, where adult pigs slaughtered at the optimal meat age of one and a half to two years prevail. Only two permanent third molars were recovered, pointing to animals between one and a half and two years old, while six milk teeth confirmed the young age of the rest. Comparable assemblages with such a strong prevalence of juvenile pigs are known from only one other La Tène site in the region, the sanctuary at Frauenberg near Leibnitz in Styria. The researchers suggest that young pigs, associated in many ancient traditions with fertility, abundance, and luck, played a central role in the rituals performed at Object 41.

Even more remarkable was the discovery of four partially preserved skeletons of non-adult pigs within the trenches of Object 41, two in the northern trench, one in the eastern, and one in the western. Tooth eruption and wear in two of these skeletons, labeled B and D, indicated ages between six and nine months. Because pigs descend from the European wild boar, whose reproductive cycle typically produces spring births, the researchers concluded that the ritual activities in Object 41 most likely took place during late autumn or early winter. This is the first time seasonality has been reconstructed for ritual practices at Roseldorf, and it offers a rare temporal anchor for ceremonies that otherwise left few traces.

Butchery patterns added another layer of distinction. The bones from Objects 40 and 41 bore numerous chop marks indicating disarticulation, dismemberment, portioning, and marrow extraction, yet the specific techniques differed from those observed in the settlement. Scapulae, tibiae, and metapodials of cattle in the sanctuaries were split longitudinally, whereas the same bones from the settlement showed transverse chops. Horses received similar treatment, with tibiae and metapodials longitudinally split for marrow extraction, a practice not recorded in the settlement assemblage, and horse scapulae from Object 40 carried cut marks absent from the domestic material. Notably, the four piglet skeletons showed no butchery marks at all, setting them apart even from the other pig remains in the same trench.

Skeletal element distribution reinforced the picture of deliberate selection. In Object 41, both cattle and pigs were represented overwhelmingly by cranial elements, ribs, and vertebrae, with meaty limb regions and small foot bones appearing in much lower numbers. This contrasts sharply with the Great Sanctuary, where cattle and horses were mainly represented by fore and hind limbs and pigs by whole individuals, and with the settlement, where all major body regions of all domesticated species occur, indicating whole animals were present. The researchers interpret this strict preference for non-meaty regions in Object 41 as evidence of a different ritual logic governing which parts of which animals were deposited where.

The study also weighed the economic cost of these rituals. Slaughtering young castrated cattle meant forgoing all secondary exploitation of one of prehistory’s most valuable species. Horses, always expensive to keep and traditionally associated with prestige, power, and wealth, appeared in unusually high numbers in Object 40. One unusually large and robust cattle scapula from Object 40 raised the possibility of the exotic large-sized cattle morphotype previously documented at the Great Sanctuary, where genetic analyses have confirmed an allochthonous population originating from the south. Such cattle were rare in La Tène-period Austria, and acquiring them would have been difficult or costly. Taken together, these observations point to rituals of considerable expense, reflecting the great importance these ceremonies held for their participants.

By comparing species composition, age and sex distribution, body part representation, butchery marks, and preservation across the settlement, the Great Sanctuary, and the two Small Sanctuaries, the study demonstrates that ritual and daily life at Roseldorf followed distinct animal-selection strategies. The absence of burnt bones and gnawing marks in the ritual deposits, unlike in the settlement, further underscores the controlled character of these contexts. The findings not only illuminate the spiritual life of an Iron Age community in Lower Austria but also contribute to the broader debate about the function of square enclosures across the La Tène world, showing that even seemingly modest structures could host elaborate, costly, and seasonally timed ceremonies.

Subject of Research: Archaeozoological analysis of animal remains from La Tène period ritual enclosures at Roseldorf, Austria

Article Title: Archaeozoology of rituals: Objects 40 and 41 (“Small Sanctuaries”) of cult district 2 in Roseldorf (Lower Austria, Middle La Tène period)

Article References: Langnitschke, T., Holzer, V., Tiefengraber, G., & Saliari, K. (2025). Archaeozoology of rituals: Objects 40 and 41 (“Small Sanctuaries”) of cult district 2 in Roseldorf (Lower Austria, Middle La Tène period). Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 126, 137-149. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.168394

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.168394

Keywords: archaeozoology, La Tène period, Iron Age, Roseldorf, ritual, animal sacrifice, square enclosures, Celtic sanctuaries, piglet skeletons, seasonality, Lower Austria, butchery marks

The research, published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, compiled data from 2017 to 2023 across the Bohemian Massif, the Carpathians, the Pannonian Basin, and three distinct Alpine systems in Austria and Italy. Sampling spanned elevations from 111 to 2,068 meters above sea level, encompassing 389 individual sampling events across 146 localities within 28 orographic units. Researchers used a standardized beating method, holding a one-square-meter sheet beneath tree and shrub branches between 30 and 250 centimeters above the ground, spending roughly twenty minutes per transect actively searching for both parasitized and unparasitized spiders. Parasitized individuals, identifiable by parasitoid larvae visibly attached to the spider’s opisthosoma, were separated immediately and reared under controlled laboratory conditions at 21 degrees Celsius and 60 to 80 percent humidity until adult wasps emerged.

The results upended expectations. Rather than following a smooth elevational gradient, parasitoidism by A. degener clustered in a geographically structured mosaic. Parasitized samples occurred at a mean elevation of 1,060 meters, compared with 751 meters for unparasitized samples, a highly significant difference. Logistic regression confirmed that the probability of parasitoidism climbed from roughly 2 percent at 200 meters to more than 35 percent at 1,600 meters. Yet when researchers tested for a classic mid-elevation peak by adding a quadratic term to their models, the improvement in fit was negligible, indicating no consistent hump-shaped response across ranges. Instead, mountain-range identity explained far more of the variation in parasitoidism than elevation alone: a model using only range as a categorical predictor reduced deviance by 25.1 percent relative to the null, while elevation alone accounted for just 10.3 percent.

This orogeographic structure manifested in stark regional contrasts. The Beskydy Mountains showed parasitoidism at five of 18 examined sites, or 27.8 percent, while the Jeseníky Mountains recorded 8 of 31 sites positive, or 25.8 percent. Meanwhile, the lowland Polabí region yielded zero detections across 20 samples at a mean elevation of approximately 180 meters, exactly as the logistic model predicted for such low elevations. Spatial scan statistics reinforced this patchiness, identifying a strong primary cluster centered in the Jeseníky region where within-cluster prevalence reached 31.7 percent against 6.3 percent outside, yielding a relative risk of 5.0 and a Monte Carlo significance of p = 0.01. Secondary clusters appeared in the Italian Alps and in the Carpathian region near the Czech-Slovak border, while one significant cold spot contained only a single parasitized sample among 64.

At the heart of this pattern lies a single spider species. Mughiphantes mughi, a small, cold-adapted linyphiid favoring shaded and humid montane environments, emerged as the principal host sustaining A. degener populations across the study area. The species exhibited a parasitoidism rate of 4.7 percent, more than double the overall mean of 1.9 percent calculated across all 4,563 examined spiders, and was parasitized at 27 percent of the sites where it occurred. Its abundance peaks in spring and autumn align neatly with the wasp’s phenology, and its consistently small adult body size may provide a suitable host throughout prolonged larval development. By contrast, spiders of the genera Entelecara and Neriene functioned as secondary or facultative hosts, exploited only under specific regional or seasonal circumstances.

The Entelecara result is particularly striking. These spiders are common and widespread in understory and shrub habitats, constructing sheet webs ecologically similar to those of Mughiphantes, yet only four parasitized individuals were observed against 30 expected under a null model of equal parasitoidism across hosts. All four came from a single mountain range, the Bukovské vrchy, suggesting intensely localized host specificity. A comparable dynamic has been documented in the related polysphinctine Zatypota percontatoria, which readily attacks the common theridiid Neottiura bimaculata in fruit orchards but rarely parasitizes the same species elsewhere. Such examples suggest that broad physiological host acceptance does not necessarily translate into widespread ecological exploitation, a distinction with major implications for how parasitoid host ranges are interpreted.

Seasonality added another dimension to the story. Mughiphantes mughi was the only host recorded in spring, while Entelecara, Kaestneria, Neriene, and Pityohyphantes were parasitized predominantly in autumn, with Entelecara and Kaestneria peaking in September and Neriene and Pityohyphantes peaking in October. Many of the spring-parasitized M. mughi likely carried larvae acquired the previous autumn, which had overwintered on their hosts before emerging as adults the following year. This pattern points to a predominantly univoltine life cycle in montane regions: parasitoidism occurs in late summer and autumn, larvae survive winter on the host, and adult wasps emerge in spring. At lower elevations and in warmer habitats, bivoltinism may occur, consistent with historical British records reporting adult flight activity from June through October.

Molecular analyses using CO1 DNA barcoding resolved a long-standing taxonomic ambiguity. Acrodactyla similis, a cryptic congener morphologically nearly indistinguishable from A. degener, was confirmed as a distinct species through both ASAP and bPTP species delimitation methods. The single sequenced A. similis specimen, collected from the Pannonian lowland parasitizing Tenuiphantes flavipes, formed a well-supported separate lineage. This finding raises an intriguing hypothesis: if A. similis occupies lowland habitats while A. degener dominates montane ones, partial elevational niche partitioning between the two species could contribute to the observed distribution patterns. Within A. degener itself, however, specimens reared from different host genera were intermingled across the phylogeny, providing no evidence of cryptic host-specialized lineages.

Yet the genetic data also hinted at unresolved complexity. Mean uncorrected pairwise p-distances within A. degener ranged from 0.4 percent in the Bohemian Massif to 2.6 percent in the Alps, with the most divergent pairwise comparisons reaching 6.3 percent. The single sequenced individual reared from Pityohyphantes phrygianus in the Italian Alps showed only 95 percent similarity to all other samples, making it the most genetically distinct specimen in the study. While intraspecific CO1 distances can reach 10 percent in parasitoid Hymenoptera, the possibility that such divergence points to cryptic species cannot be excluded with current sampling. Broader geographic coverage and additional genetic markers will be needed to determine whether this structure reflects geography, host use, or incipient ecological differentiation.

The study’s authors acknowledge limitations, including uneven seasonal coverage, with autumn sampling missing from key mountain systems, and underrepresentation of lowland habitats where structurally suitable conifer stands are rare. Preliminary observations also suggest host body size may constrain parasitoid development: larvae were recorded only on juvenile Neriene whose body size approximated that of large M. mughi, hinting that successful development requires hosts within a specific size range. Nevertheless, the overall picture is clear. Acrodactyla degener occupies an intermediate position between strict specialist and true generalist, combining broad physiological host acceptance with geographically and seasonally structured ecological specialization. As a model system for investigating host shifts and the evolution of host use in polysphinctine wasps, it offers a window into how ecological context, not just evolutionary capability, shapes the realized niches of parasitoids in fragmented montane landscapes.

Subject of Research: Ecology and host specificity of the parasitoid Darwin wasp Acrodactyla degener across Central and Southern European mountain systems

Article Title: When generalists become picky: Regional and seasonal specialization in a pimpline Darwin wasp ( Hymenoptera , Ichneumonidae ) with a supposedly broad host range

Article References: Korenko, S., Solar, F., Rothová, H., Janšta, P., Šimečková, A., Černecká, Ľ., Gajdoš, P., Purgat, P., Opatová, V., & Heneberg, P. (2026). When generalists become picky: Regional and seasonal specialization in a pimpline Darwin wasp (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae) with a supposedly broad host range. Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 99, 753-778. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.99.186686

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jhr.99.186686

Keywords: Acrodactyla degener, parasitoid wasps, Ichneumonidae, Linyphiidae, host specificity, elevation gradients, montane ecology, seasonality, DNA barcoding, cryptic species, spider parasitoids, Central Europe

Lemnos occupies a special place in the history of agriculture. Farming spread into Europe from the Fertile Crescent through Greece roughly 9,000 to 8,500 years ago, and Lemnos has been inhabited since at least the Neolithic, prized for its fertile plains and cultivable soils. Over millennia, farmers selected crops suited to local conditions, producing distinctive landraces, while wild plants co-evolved alongside the sown species to form what ecologists call agrestal communities, the wild flora of arable land. Today, arable fields still cover a substantial and relatively stable share of the island, and agriculture remains largely traditional: winter cereals grown as fodder, often in mixed intercropping systems of barley and oat, rotated with pulses and fallows, followed by grazing on stubble.

This system, which has largely disappeared elsewhere, is precisely what makes Lemnos scientifically valuable. Across most of Europe, less intensive agriculture has become rare, squeezed between abandonment on marginal land and intensification on fertile soil. Because many arable plants depend on the regular disturbance of traditional farming, both trends drive biodiversity loss. The habitat type that the study addresses, arable land managed by low-intensity methods, is listed as Endangered on the European Red List of Habitats. Understanding the species composition, land-use requirements, and environmental constraints of these communities is therefore essential for their conservation, and Lemnos offers a rare living laboratory in which rotational fallowing and stubble fields still exist.

Between 2018 and 2022, with additional sampling in May 2025, researchers recorded vegetation in 174 plots across the island: 130 in spring, during April and May, and 44 in fall, during September and October. The plots, mostly 100 square meters, lay within field interiors growing cereals such as six-rowed barley, oat, and durum wheat, pulses such as common vetch and garden pea, and in fallow and stubble fields. Fields showing signs of herbicide use or heavy fertilization were excluded. The team estimated the cover of every species using the Braun-Blanquet scale and analyzed the resulting data with non-metric multidimensional scaling, a technique that arranges plots in space according to how similar their species compositions are, together with a modified TWINSPAN clustering algorithm to classify the spring communities.

The seasonal contrast proved to be the single strongest driver of floristic variation. A permutational multivariate analysis of variance confirmed that season significantly shaped community composition, and a test of group dispersion showed the difference was driven by species identity rather than variability among plots. Spring fields belonged to early-flowering annuals such as rigid ryegrass, scarlet pimpernel, corn poppy, wild radish, and corn gromwell, plants that complete their life cycle and set seed before the May harvest. Fall plots, by contrast, were dominated by late-flowering annuals, biennials, and perennials such as stinking fleabane, European heliotrope, yellow star-thistle, and chicory, species that germinate or form rosettes in spring and flower after the harvest. Many of them share adaptations, including basal rosettes, prostrate growth, and low-attached branches, that reduce damage from mowing and grazing, allowing them to persist in the post-harvest landscape.

Within the spring fields, the clustering analysis revealed four distinct plant communities, and their distribution mapped cleanly onto the island’s geology. Volcanic rocks and tuffs cover about 30 percent of Lemnos and produce shallow, stony, acidic soils, while Eocene-Oligocene molasse sediments and Holocene alluvial deposits yield deeper, often base-rich ground. The first community, named for Anchusa hybrida and Hypecoum imberbe, occupied dry, well-drained, sandy soils derived from molasse, often on young fallows and pulse fields. The second, the Raphanus raphanistrum-Cladanthus mixtus community, preferred sandy, acidic, base-poor soils that were partly seasonally wet, indicated by species such as toad rush and corn spurrey. The third, the Glebionis segetum-Ranunculus marginatus community, grew on productive alluvial lowlands with intermediate to seasonally wet moisture, and the fourth, the Hypericum triquetrifolium-Leontice leontopetalum community, was tied to loamy, stony, base-rich soils, where it hosted striking geophytes including the pink-flowered Gladiolus italicus.

Ecological indicator values for Europe, which assign each plant species numerical scores for its preferences regarding soil reaction, moisture, nutrients, light, and temperature, allowed the researchers to quantify these relationships. Fitting the community-weighted indicator means into a three-dimensional ordination showed that the primary gradient, the first ordination axis, was strongly correlated with soil reaction, with a coefficient of determination of 0.777 and a p-value of 0.001, cleanly separating the acidic-soil communities from the base-rich ones. A second axis was marginally correlated with temperature and moisture, distinguishing the drier communities from the wetter ones. Light and nutrients were not significant. A chi-squared test further confirmed that the underlying geological substrates differed significantly among the communities, with alluvial deposits underlying 73 percent of the Glebionis segetum-Ranunculus marginatus fields and molasse and tuffs dominating the base-rich community.

Crop type and management also left their fingerprints. Barley was the most common crop overall and dominated the base-rich community, while mixed maslins of barley and oat appeared in at least 21 percent of fields in every spring community and reached 42 percent in the alluvial community. Pulse fields were concentrated in the Anchusa hybrida-Hypecoum imberbe community, and wheats were most frequent in the acidic-soil community. The base-rich and alluvial communities contained the island’s most productive fields, rich in nutrient-demanding species and in speirochorous plants such as corncockle and darnel ryegrass, which are sown inadvertently with farm-saved crop seed, a hallmark of traditional seed use. Species richness averaged 26.6 taxa per plot in spring against 15.6 in fall, and the base-rich community was the richest of all, with a median above 30 species per plot and a maximum of 62.

Perhaps the most consequential result concerns the obligate agrestal species, plants that in Greece occur almost exclusively in arable fields. The surveys recorded 33 such species, including several classified as threatened on the national Red List: darnel ryegrass and Leontice leontopetalum as Vulnerable, and corncockle, rough poppy, and Anagallis foemina as Near Threatened or Vulnerable. Rarer still were Adonis annua, Allium cyrilli, Bupleurum subovatum, Glaucium corniculatum, Vaccaria hispanica, and others, each found in only one to four plots, and most of them concentrated in the base-rich Hypericum triquetrifolium-Leontice leontopetalum community. The mean number of obligate species per plot was highest in that community, confirming that the least productive-looking loamy fields are in fact the island’s most important refuges for specialized arable flora.

The study’s authors place their communities within the broader syntaxonomic framework of Eurasian arable vegetation, finding affinities with alliances described from the western Mediterranean while noting that some diagnostic species of those western alliances are rare or absent in the east, and that Leontice leontopetalum appears to characterize the eastern Mediterranean branch of the base-rich alliance. Beyond classification, the message is ecological and urgent. Arable plants sustain pollinators and farmland birds, and the succession of early- and late-flowering species on Lemnos provides continuous floral resources throughout the growing season. As agricultural intensification proceeds across Europe, initiatives such as the Terra Lemnia project, which supports the island’s traditional practices, landraces, and farmland biodiversity, demonstrate that low-intensity farming and conservation are not opposing goals. Lemnos, the authors conclude, stands as a rare in situ refuge for segetal biodiversity and a reference system for restoring biodiversity-rich agricultural landscapes elsewhere.

Subject of Research: Agrestal plant communities and their soil and seasonal drivers in less intensively managed farmland on the Greek island of Lemnos

Article Title: Soil and season shape less intensively managed agro-ecosystems of a Mediterranean island—Insights from Lemnos (Greece)

Article References: Rinne, L., Meyer, S., & Bergmeier, E. (2025). Soil and season shape less intensively managed agro-ecosystems of a Mediterranean island—Insights from Lemnos (Greece). Vegetation Classification and Survey, 6, 253-271. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.164437

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/VCS.164437

Keywords: agro-ecosystems, arable plants, Lemnos, Greece, Mediterranean agriculture, plant communities, soil gradients, seasonality, biodiversity conservation, vegetation classification, traditional farming, threatened species

The research, published in Neotropical Biology and Conservation, followed radio-tagged lizards at a study site near Frigatebird Hill during March 2016, at the peak of the hot-wet season, and again in August 2016, during the cool-dry period. Researchers fitted each animal with a 0.5-gram radio transmitter glued to the dorsal pelvis, then relocated them three times a day, in the morning, at midday, and in the late afternoon. Over 165 total tracking days and 451 radiolocations, the team mapped each lizard’s movements on a 60-by-60-meter survey grid, then analyzed the resulting tracks with two complementary methods: minimum convex polygons, which enclose all recorded positions, and autocorrelated kernel density estimation, a statistical approach that captures clusters of repeated use within an animal’s range.

The seasonal contrast was stark. Lizards in March moved an average of 14.2 meters per day, while those in August managed only 5.8 meters, a large effect size that held regardless of sex. Activity areas told the same story. The mean core area, representing the 50 percent utilization distribution, shrank from roughly 151 square meters in March to just 43 square meters in August. Overall home ranges, measured as 95 percent utilization distributions, contracted from about 750 square meters to 238 square meters. These are not subtle shifts; they represent a fundamental restructuring of how much space an individual lizard needs to make a living depending on the time of year.

Equally striking was what the lizards did with the space they retained. Rather than wandering uniformly across their ranges, individuals concentrated their movements within a single core area, occasionally making repeated forays to specific peripheral spots. The researchers interpret these excursions as likely related to searching for prey, establishing ambush sites, or monitoring potential mates and rivals. When neighboring lizards’ ranges overlapped, the overlap occurred almost exclusively at the broader 95 percent level. Core areas, by contrast, rarely overlapped at all, suggesting that these tightly used zones function as de facto territories within larger, more permissive activity areas.

Habitat selection proved equally season-dependent. In March, the strongest predictors of where a lizard chose to position itself were distance to the nearest low tree and substrate temperature. Lizards selected microhabitats with cooler substrate temperatures than random sites would predict, and they positioned themselves roughly 2.4 times farther from low trees than expected in the morning, gradually moving closer as the day progressed. This pattern is consistent with a classic thermoregulatory strategy: bask on open rock faces in the cool morning, then retreat to shaded spots as the equatorial sun climbs. By afternoon, lizards had shifted to rocks under canopy, detritus, and the vicinity of larger trees.

In August, the picture changed entirely. The top statistical models pointed toward rock crevices and open rock faces, but no single predictor received strong, consistent support across the model set. Lizards spent their days in or near crevices, on detritus, or under low vegetation, and four individuals, two females and two males, were documented remaining inactive for entire days. One male was stationary for six consecutive days, moved 11.4 meters in a single burst, then settled back into near-total inactivity. This kind of multi-day dormancy was essentially absent during the hot-wet period.

The researchers attribute these behavioral shifts to a combination of thermal and resource constraints. During March 2016, operative temperatures on open rock faces in direct sunlight exceeded the lizards’ preferred body temperature range by roughly 8 degrees Celsius, making shaded rock faces under canopy the only viable midday option. In August, by contrast, temperatures in sun and shade converged and fell within the preferred range only briefly during late morning and early afternoon. Yet lizards still overwhelmingly chose shaded rock faces, possibly because conductive heat from rock surfaces remains available even under leafless canopy, or because staying hidden reduces exposure to predators such as Galápagos racers, hawks, and feral cats.

Resource scarcity likely compounds the thermal story. By August, the dominant palo santo and Jerusalem thorn trees had dropped most of their leaves, leaving primary production to sparse evergreen shrubs and grasses. Since lava lizards consume both plant material and arthropods, the cool-dry season represents a bottleneck in both food and water availability. Reduced movement and extended inactivity may be an energy-conservation strategy, similar to patterns documented in other tropical reptiles such as Guatemalan beaded lizards, which contract their home ranges by up to 90 percent during dry periods.

The study’s authors caution that their monitoring windows were relatively short, offering snapshots rather than a full annual picture. Still, the consistency of the seasonal effect across all measured metrics, from daily distance to home range size to microhabitat choice, suggests that San Cristóbal lava lizards are finely tuned to the temporal rhythm of their environment. As climate patterns shift and El Niño and La Niña events grow more variable, understanding how these lizards buffer themselves against seasonal extremes may become increasingly important for predicting their resilience across the Galápagos.

What emerges from this work is a portrait of an animal that is neither a passive hostage of its thermal environment nor a freewheeling explorer of its landscape. Instead, the San Cristóbal lava lizard operates as a strategic compromise artist, expanding its world when conditions permit and contracting it when they do not, always balancing the competing demands of staying warm enough, staying hydrated, staying fed, and staying alive.

Subject of Research: Seasonal variation in spatial ecology, habitat use, and habitat selection of the San Cristóbal lava lizard in the Galápagos

Article Title: Seasonal variations in spatial ecology, habitat use and habitat selection by San Cristóbal lava lizards Microlophus bivittatus in Galápagos

Article References: Rowe, J. W., Moore, J. A., Fonley, M. R., Clark, D. L., & Valle, C. A. (2026). Seasonal variations in spatial ecology, habitat use and habitat selection by San Cristóbal lava lizards Microlophus bivittatus in Galápagos. Neotropical Biology and Conservation, 21(2), 149-171. https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.21.e185618

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neotropical.21.e185618

Keywords: Galápagos, lava lizard, Microlophus bivittatus, radiotelemetry, habitat selection, thermoregulation, seasonality, home range, ectotherm, spatial ecology, San Cristóbal, reptile behavior

The research team, led by Christian Propach and Mario Hönemann of the Virology Department at Leipzig University Medical Center, analyzed over 29,000 respiratory specimens collected between 2012 and 2022. Using nucleic acid amplification assays capable of detecting multiple respiratory pathogens, the investigators identified 469 unique adult cases of endemic human coronavirus infection across 11 seasons. This unusually long observation window allowed the team to capture year-to-year variation in viral circulation that shorter studies inevitably miss, revealing patterns that carry important implications for understanding coronavirus biology more broadly.

Among the four endemic species, HCoV-OC43 emerged as the most frequently detected, accounting for 38.6 percent of cases, followed by HCoV-NL63 at 25.6 percent, HCoV-229E at 22.4 percent, and HCoV-HKU1 at 13.4 percent. All four viruses exhibited pronounced seasonality, with the vast majority of detections occurring during winter months and activity peaking between January and March. This winter concentration mirrors the behavior of other respiratory viruses such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, though the researchers also documented sporadic summer detections of HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-NL63, indicating that these pathogens never entirely disappear from the population.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding concerns the circulation dynamics of individual species. While HCoV-NL63 was detected year-round, HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 displayed a striking biennial pattern, alternating between years of high and low activity. No consistent cyclic pattern was observed for HCoV-229E. The authors suggest that this alternating behavior may reflect immunological interactions within the coronavirus family, a phenomenon in which infection with one species generates cross-reactive immunity that temporarily suppresses circulation of another. Similar mechanisms have been proposed for other virus groups, and the biennial rhythm observed here provides some of the clearest real-world evidence that such interference may operate among endemic human coronaviruses.

Beyond epidemiology, the study yielded clinically significant findings about disease severity. HCoV-OC43 infections were more frequently associated with dyspnea, occurring in 48.1 percent of cases, lower respiratory tract infection at 45.3 percent, exacerbation of obstructive lung disease at 17.6 percent, and systemic prednisolone administration at 16 percent. These associations were statistically significant, suggesting that OC43 may be particularly prone to driving lower airway disease in vulnerable adults. The finding that corticosteroid use was more common in OC43 cases underscores the clinical burden this virus imposes on patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions.

HCoV-HKU1 told a different story. Although it was the least frequently detected species, HKU1 infection was significantly more common among patients with lymphoma, appearing in 35.6 percent of HKU1 cases, and was associated with higher in-hospital mortality at 18.6 percent. This finding raises questions about whether HKU1 disproportionately affects immunocompromised individuals or whether the association reflects underlying differences in patient populations. Either way, the result highlights that endemic coronaviruses are not uniformly benign and that certain species may pose heightened risks to specific patient groups.

Co-infections emerged as another critical determinant of outcome. The researchers identified 119 co-infections among the 469 cases, representing 26.0 percent of the cohort. These included viral pathogens in 10.9 percent of cases, bacterial pathogens in 10.5 percent, and fungal pathogens in 1.7 percent. Co-infections were significantly associated with lower respiratory tract infection, need for mechanical ventilation, and ICU admission, indicating that the presence of additional pathogens substantially worsens clinical course. This observation aligns with growing recognition that respiratory viral infections rarely occur in isolation and that polymicrobial disease carries disproportionate severity.

The study’s conclusion emphasizes that the clinical presentation and severity of endemic coronavirus infections depend heavily on patient age, comorbidities, and the presence of co-infecting pathogens. This nuanced picture challenges the common perception of these viruses as mere cold-causing nuisances. In hospitalized adults, particularly those with underlying conditions such as obstructive lung disease or hematologic malignancies, endemic coronaviruses can trigger serious respiratory illness requiring intensive care. The findings carry practical implications for diagnostic testing, infection control, and clinical management in tertiary care settings.

From a broader scientific perspective, the decade-long dataset offers valuable context for understanding coronavirus behavior in the post-pandemic era. The biennial cycling of OC43 and HKU1, the year-round presence of NL63, and the irregular pattern of 229E suggest that these viruses occupy distinct ecological niches shaped by population immunity, viral interference, and possibly environmental factors. As researchers continue to investigate whether endemic coronaviruses influence SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics, longitudinal datasets like the Leipzig cohort become increasingly important for disentangling these complex interactions.

The research, conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of Leipzig University, relied on anonymized biological material obtained for standard viral diagnosis with written informed consent from all participants. The team acknowledges that retrospective single-center designs have limitations, including potential referral bias inherent in a tertiary care population. Nevertheless, the consistency of the seasonal and species-specific patterns across 11 seasons lends considerable weight to the findings. As climate patterns shift and respiratory virus epidemiology evolves, continued surveillance of these endemic pathogens will be essential for anticipating future circulation trends and preparing healthcare systems for the clinical burden they impose.

Subject of Research: Epidemiology and clinical significance of endemic human coronaviruses in adult patients at a German tertiary care hospital

Article Title: A decade of endemic human coronaviruses: epidemiological patterns and clinical significance in an adult cohort at a tertiary care hospital in Germany

Article References: Propach, C., Hönemann, M., Vučinić, V., Frille, A., Berthold, T., Bergs, S., Maier, M., & Pietsch, C. (2026). A decade of endemic human coronaviruses: epidemiological patterns and clinical significance in an adult cohort at a tertiary care hospital in Germany. BMC Infectious Diseases, 26(1), Article 1706. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-026-14377-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12879-026-14377-1

Keywords: endemic coronaviruses, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63, HCoV-HKU1, HCoV-229E, respiratory infections, epidemiology, seasonality, co-infection, tertiary care hospital, Germany, viral interference