Ecology

“Virovores” — organisms that survive and multiply by eating viruses — might influence the flow of energy through ecosystems.

The ecologist Holly Moeller studies microorganisms that expand their range by absorbing organelles and gaining new metabolic talents from their prey.

The discovery of a hot spot for horizontal gene transfer draws attention to the possible roles of parasites and ecology in such changes.

A custom-built machine learning algorithm can predict when a complex system is about to switch to a wildly different mode of behavior.

New research finds that chaos plays a bigger role in population dynamics than decades of ecological data seemed to suggest.

The lush biodiversity of the Amazon may be due in part to the dynamics of branching rivers, which serve as invisible fences that continuously barricade and merge bird populations.

The spate of furious wildfires around the world during the past decade has revealed to ecologists how much biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” go hand in hand.

While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent priority, biologists also learned more about how brains process information, how to define individuality and why sleep deprivation kills.

The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.