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November 2024

Sexual selection, one of the central pillars of evolutionary theory, has powerful effects on organismal morphology, behavior, and population dynamics. However, current knowledge about geographical variation in this evolutionary mechanism and its underlying drivers remains highly incomplete, in part because standardized data on the strength of sexual selection is sparse even for well-studied organisms. Barber et al. use information on mating systems—including the incidence of polygamy and extra-pair paternity—to estimate the intensity of sexual selection in the world’s birds. Overall, their analyses suggest that climatic conditions leading to short, intense breeding seasons, or highly abundant and patchy food resources, increase the potential for polygamy in birds, driving latitudinal gradients in sexual selection. By presenting selection scores and associated uncertainty for 10,671 (>99.9%) bird species, Barber et al. provide a global template for future research on the causes and consequences of sexual selection, also highlighting gaps in knowledge. For example, further research is required to understand the mating systems of many tropical bird species – including the black-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris nectarinioides) pictured here.

Image Credit: Joseph Tobias

Essay

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Consensus View

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Perspectives

Queer- and trans-inclusive faculty hiring—A call for change

J. L. Weissman, Callie R. Chappell, Bruno Francesco Rodrigues de Oliveira, Natalya Evans, Anna C. Fagre, Desiree Forsythe, Steven A. Frese, Rachel Gregor, Suzanne L. Ishaq, Juliet Johnston, Bittu K. R., Shayle B. Matsuda, Sam McCarren, Melanie Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa, Troy A. Roepke, Nasa. Sinnott-Armstrong, Cora S. Stobie, Lauren Talluto, José M. Vargas-Muñiz, The Advancing Queer and Trans Equity in Science (AQTES) Consortium

A call for research to address the threat of paper mills

Jennifer A. Byrne, Anna Abalkina, Olufolake Akinduro-Aje, Jana Christopher, Sarah E. Eaton, Nitin Joshi, Ulf Scheffler, Nick H. Wise, Jennifer Wright

Research Articles

Climate and ecology predict latitudinal trends in sexual selection inferred from avian mating systems

Robert A. Barber, Jingyi Yang, Chenyue Yang, Oonagh Barker, Tim Janicke, Joseph A. Tobias

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Cécile Courret, Lucas W. Hemmer, Xiaolu Wei, Prachi D. Patel, Bryce J. Chabot, Nicholas J. Fuda, Xuewen Geng, Ching-Ho Chang, Barbara G. Mellone, Amanda M. Larracuente

Microbial occurrence and symbiont detection in a global sample of lichen metagenomes

Gulnara Tagirdzhanova, Paul Saary, Ellen S. Cameron, Carmen C. G. Allen, Arkadiy I. Garber, David Díaz Escandón, Andrew T. Cook, Spencer Goyette, Veera Tuovinen Nogerius, Alfredo Passo, Helmut Mayrhofer, Håkon Holien, Tor Tønsberg, Lisa Y. Stein, Robert D. Finn, Toby Spribille

Trajectories of human brain functional connectome maturation across the birth transition

Lanxin Ji, Iris Menu, Amyn Majbri, Tanya Bhatia, Christopher J. Trentacosta, Moriah E. Thomason

High-level visual prediction errors in early visual cortex

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Thalamic spindles and Up states coordinate cortical and hippocampal co-ripples in humans

Charles W. Dickey, Ilya A. Verzhbinsky, Sophie Kajfez, Burke Q. Rosen, Christopher E. Gonzalez, Patrick Y. Chauvel, Sydney S. Cash, Sandipan Pati, Eric Halgren

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Methods and Resources

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