Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen

The Red Queen metaphor has species accumulating small changes to keep up with a continually changing environment, with speciation occurring at a constant rate. This constant-rate claim is now tested against four competing models, using 101 phylogenies of animal, plant and fungal taxa. The results provide a new interpretation of the Red Queen; a view linking speciation to rare stochastic events that cause reproductive isolation.

Impact of chronic neonicotinoid exposure on honeybee colony performance and queen supersedure

BACKGROUND: Honeybees provide economically and ecologically vital pollination services to crops and wild plants. During the last decade elevated colony losses have been documented in Europe and North America. Despite growing consensus on the involvement of multiple causal factors, the underlying interactions impacting on honeybee health and colony failure are not fully resolved. Parasites and pathogens are among the main candidates, but sublethal exposure to widespread agricultural pesticides may also affect bees. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To investigate effects of sublethal dietary neonicotinoid exposure on honeybee colony performance, a fully crossed experimental design was implemented using 24 colonies, including sister-queens from two different strains, and experimental in-hive pollen feeding with or without environmentally relevant concentrations of thiamethoxam and clothianidin. Honeybee colonies chronically exposed to both neonicotinoids over two brood cycles exhibited decreased performance in the short-term resulting in declining numbers of adult bees (-28%) and brood (-13%), as well as a reduction in honey production (-29%) and pollen collections (-19%), but colonies recovered in the medium-term and overwintered successfully. However, significantly decelerated growth of neonicotinoid-exposed colonies during the following spring was associated with queen failure, revealing previously undocumented long-term impacts of neonicotinoids: queen supersedure was observed for 60% of the neonicotinoid-exposed colonies within a one year period, but not for control colonies. Linked to this, neonicotinoid exposure was significantly associated with a reduced propensity to swarm during the next spring. Both short-term and long-term effects of neonicotinoids on colony performance were significantly influenced by the honeybees' genetic background. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Sublethal neonicotinoid exposure did not provoke increased winter losses. Yet, significant detrimental short and long-term impacts on colony performance and queen fate suggest that neonicotinoids may contribute to colony weakening in a complex manner. Further, we highlight the importance of the genetic basis of neonicotinoid susceptibility in honeybees which can vary substantially.

The Vida of Queen Fredegund in Tote Listoire de France: vernacular translation and genre in thirteenth-century French and Occitan literature

This article examines the role that translation may have played in the development of medieval vernacular literature. It analyses an extract of an early 13th-c. translation into a hybrid French-Occitan vernacular of an 8th-c. historical text, the 'Liber Historiae Francorum'. The translation coincides with the adoption of narrative prose both in Old French and in Occitan literature, which reflects a growing interest in historical writings. The second half of the article compares the anecdote with the narrative structures and content of one of the troubadour 'vidas' and 'razos' - biographical texts in prose that emerged in the same period and regions as this translation. The article concludes by suggesting that the new vernacular genre shares narrative features with the early medieval Latin text that are preserved in its translation.

The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: the transmission of female-voiced burlesque poetry in the early seventeenth century

The essay uncovers evidence for the construction of the ‘woman author’ in the largely male vogue for bawdy burlesque poetry by tracing the circulation of a pair of verses through seventeenth-century manuscript and print miscellanies. It argues that just as these verses are reworked and recontextualised through the process of transmission, so to their ‘authors’ are re-embodied and ascribed different identities in different publication contexts. Female-voiced bawdy poetry raises particular problems for authorial attribution, rather than searching for the real woman behind the text, the essay examines how the ‘authors’ of female-voiced bawdy poetry were produced and reproduced through shifting formal frameworks and socioliterary networks.