Scientific Papers

Nature Seychelles, partners' and other published scientific papers in PDF format. Note that these papers have been made available to Nature Seychelles by their authors and have been made publicly available to the extent that any applicable copyrights are respected by those who download them. Copies of papers downloaded may be used for educational and non-commercial purposes only and may not be reproduced or circulated.  

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Why sexually mature individuals stay in groups as nonreproductive subordinates is central to the evolution of sociality and cooperative breeding. To understand such delayed dispersal, its costs and benefits need to be compared with those of permanently leaving to float through the population. However, comprehensive comparisons, especially regarding differences in future breeding opportunities, are rare.

Ecological baselines are disappearing and it is uncertain how marine reserves, there called fisheries closures, simulate pristine communities. We tested the influence of fisheries closure age, size and compliance on recovery of community biomass and life-history metrics towards a baseline. We used census data from 324 coral reefs, including 41 protected areas ranging between 1 and 45 years of age and 0.28 and 1430 km2, and 36 sites in a remote baseline, the Chagos Archipelago. Fish community-level life histories changed towards larger and later maturing fauna with increasing closure age, size and
compliance.

Introduced populations often lose the parasites they carried in their native range, but little is known about which processes may cause parasite loss during host movement. Conservation-driven translocations could provide an opportunity to identify the mechanisms involved. Using 3,888 blood samples collected over 22 years, we investigated parasite prevalence in populations of Seychelles warblers (Acrocephalus sechellensis) after individuals were translocated from Cousin Island to four new islands.

Parasites can have severe impacts on the fitness of their hosts, and can influence reproduction, survival and sexual selection. Therefore, understanding if and how hosts mitigate the negative effects of infections is of major importance to understanding host-parasite co-evolution and host life-history evolution.

Understanding why individuals delay dispersal and become subordinates within a group is central to studying the evolution of sociality. Hypotheses predict that dispersal decisions are influenced by costs of extra-territorial prospecting that are often required to find a breeding vacancy. Little is known about such costs, partly because it is complicated to demonstrate themempirically.

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