Orphaned animals benefit from being adopted, but it is unclear why an adopting parent should incur the costs of rearing extra young. Such altruistic parental behaviour could be favoured if it is directed towards kin and ...

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is a Holarctic species found in North America primarily across the boreal forest, the subarctic, and along the Pacific coast, including Vancouver Island (VI), British Columbia. While wolverines ...

Orchids often have specific pollinators, which should provide reproductive isolation, yet many produce natural hybrids. Platanthera dilatata and P. stricta differ in floral morphology but often co-occur, overlap in ...

Captive breeding is often a last resort management option in the conservation of endangered species which can in turn lead to increased risk of inbreeding depression and loss of genetic diversity. Thus, recording breeding ...

Island biogeography can promote rapid diversification and speciation via geographic isolation and novel selection pressures. These same factors can threaten the persistence of island endemics by limiting gene flow and suitable ...

Our understanding of gut microbiota has been limited primarily to findings from human and laboratory animals, but what shapes the gut microbiota in nature remains largely unknown. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive ...

North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) anticipate when white spruce (Picea glauca), their primary food source, will produce large amounts of cones in infrequent and irregular mast years (Boutin et al. 2006). ...

The Canadian Rocky Mountains are one of the few places on Earth where the spatial genetic structure of wide-ranging species has been relatively unaffected by anthropogenic disturbance. We characterized the spatial genetic ...

The origins of feral cats in Australia may be understood with the help of molecular studies, but it is important that hypotheses be tested with appropriate sampling and methodology. We point out several shortcomings in ...