Animal Migration: An Overview of One of Nature's Great Spectacles

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion in research on animal migration, in large part due to a technological revolution in tracking and remote-sensing technologies, along with advances in genomics and integrative biology. We now have access to unprecedented amounts of data on when, where, and how animals migrate across various continents and oceans. Among the important advancements, recent studies have uncovered a surprising level of variation in migratory trajectories at the species and population levels with implications for both speciation and the conservation of migratory populations. At the organismal level, studies linking molecular and physiological mechanisms to traits that support migration have revealed a remarkable amount of seasonal flexibility in many migratory animals. Advancements in the theory for why animals migrate have resulted in promising new directions for empirical studies. We provide an overview of the current state of knowledge and promising future avenues of study. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Volume 52 is November 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Centering microbes in the emerging role of integrative biology in understanding environmental change

Synopsis We argue that the current environmental changes stressing the Earth’s biological systems urgently require study from an integrated perspective to reveal unexpected, cross-scale interactions, particularly between microbes and macroscale phenomena. Such interactions are the basis of a mechanistic understanding of the important connections between deforestation and emerging infectious disease, feedback between ecosystem disturbance and the gut microbiome, and the cross-scale effects of environmental pollutants. These kinds of questions can be answered with existing techniques and data, but a concerted effort is necessary to better coordinate studies and data sets from different disciplines to fully leverage their potential.

In Their Own Words: Marvalee Wake

In Their Own Words chronicles the stories of scientists who have made great contributions to their fields. These short histories provide our readers a way to learn from and share their experiences. Each month, we will publish in the pages of BioScience and on our podcast, BioScience Talks (http://bioscienceaibs.libsyn.com), the results of these conversations. This history is with Marvalee Wake, professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a past president of AIBS. Note: Both the text and audio versions have been edited for clarity and length.

First person – Julien Pernier

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Julien Pernier is first author on ‘Myosin 1b flattens and prunes branched actin filaments’, published in JCS. Julien conducted the research described in this article while a postdoc in Patricia Bassereau's lab at the Institut Curie, Paris, France. He is now a postdoc in the lab of Christophe Le Clainche at the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC), Gif-sur-Yvette, France, investigating the roles of actin-binding proteins in actin network dynamics and organization.