Kings and queens of social termites can live for decades, while queens sustain a nearly maximal fertility. We found that they defy aging by multiple gene expression and metabolic changes, while permitting extreme fertility in queens.
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The article, published in Global Change Biology on 18 July 2021, assembles for the first time a substantial body of empirical evidence on the positive impacts of cultivated biodiversity on agroecosystems.
Crop diversification was found to enhance crop production by 14% and associated biodiversity by almost 25%. Water quality was improved by 50%, pest and disease control by over 63% and soil quality by 11%.
As part of a partnership with the City of Paris, several members of the laboratory (Basile Finand, Céline Bocquet, Pierre Federici, Thibaud Monnin et Nicolas Loeuille (“EERI” Team of “DCFE” Department and “ESEAE” Team of “EcoEvo” Department) sample the soil fauna and in particular the ants in the Parisian green spaces. To popularize and explain this […]
Great tits living in cities are genetically different from great tits in the countryside. This is what researchers have found in a unique study, where they examined populations of great tits in nine large European cities.
The researchers compared the city bird genes with the genes of their relatives in the countryside. It did not matter if the great tits lived in Milan, Malmö or Madrid: in order to handle an environment created by humans, the birds evolved in a similar way.
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Minerals are widely assumed to protect organic matter (OM) from degradation in the environment, promoting the persistence of carbon in soil and sediments. In this Review, we describe the mechanisms and processes operating at the mineral–organic interface as they relate to OM transformation dynamics.
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Corentin DOURMAP is PhD student at iEES Paris. Last March 19th he participated in the final contest of Alliance Sorbonne Université of the Ma Thèse en 180 secondes contest. He has been able to describe simply his PhD project which consist in studying the seed development. He used a metaphor to be understood by general public: the building of a shelving unit. Watch the video of his performance.
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Climate changeaffectsbiodiversity globally, by forcing species to shift their distribution to track the changes in temperature. An international collaboration between scientists from France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland shows, in an article published in the journal Ecology Letters,that habitat fragmentation caused by human activity affects distribution shifts in butterfly species and, hence, their capacity to cope with climate change.
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Our results suggest that V. velutina is a generalist opportunistic predator targeting mostly locally abundant prey. While the species may have an impact on honeybees, its generalist, opportunistic behaviour on abundant insects suggests a minor impact on wild species.
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Results, published in Communications Biology , suggest that the evolution of a virus integrated into a eukaryotic genome is totally different when it is useful to the organism that carries it.
A species of “murder hornet,” beheads and feeds to its larvae an insect that is very important to, and symbolic of, France: the honeybee.
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