Royal Society Publishing

24/08/2025

When dispersing between groups, female mountain gorillas may be primarily looking for other females they grew up with. Female gorillas can move between multiple social groups during their lifetime, but how do they choose where to go? A study analysing the movement of 56 females for over two decades shows that this decision is strongly influenced by social history and that female-female relationships have the strongest impact on dispersal patterns. Female mountain gorillas avoided groups containing males they grew up with, reducing inbreeding risk, but consistently preferred groups with females they had lived with previously. Even after years apart, female relationships continued to shape dispersal, challenging long-standing assumptions that dispersal is driven solely by mating opportunities. These findings reveal the deeply social nature of dispersal, offering insight into the evolution of flexible, socially connected societies – like our own.

Read the BBC article:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80d7l94yvro

Read the full paper in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.0223

23/08/2025

Dingo movement depends on s*x, social status and litter size. Territoriality influences animal movement as individuals defend areas from outsiders. Researchers studied dingo space use in Australia, tracking five packs with GPS collars and camera traps, focusing on movement changes before and during the annual breeding season. Subdominant males were detected more often outside their home range, likely seeking mates, while subdominant females showed no change. Dominant dingoes spent more time in their territory, especially when they had more pups from the previous year, possibly defending resources and mates. These findings highlight how s*x, breeding status, and competition shape movement, informing management strategies for apex predators like dingoes.

Read the article in Royal Society Open Science:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.250255

22/08/2025

Great t**s show early signs of splitting up. The process of pair bonding in wild great t**s (Parus major) often begins before the breeding season, with pairs forming during the non-breeding winter. However, we have little understanding of how behaviour in the non-breeding season reflects the pair bonding dynamics of pairs which have already bred together. In new research, researchers showed that early signs of divorce could be identified in the winter, months before the couples rebreed with different partners in the following spring. Pairs that later separated spent significantly less time together during the winter than those that remained faithful. Faithful pairs increasingly bonded over time, while divorcing pairs grew more distant—even visiting feeders at different times.

Read the article in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.3065

22/08/2025

Pregnancy at high altitude represents a powerful experiment of nature in which the mother and her unborn baby face the challenge of breathing thin air with a reduced supply of oxygen.

Read about the latest research in a new theme issue of Philosophical Transactions B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2025/380/1933

21/08/2025

Agricultural pest management mainly relies on the use of insecticides and decreasing crop productivity has been a prominent argument against their reductions but the relationship between insecticide and crop yields is complex. Through long-term monitoring of yields, farming practices, pest populations and natural pest control across 383 fields of oilseed r**e, researchers reveal a negative relationship between yield and insecticide use because of impacts on natural pest control that lead to increase of pest abundance. The study demonstrates that insecticides do not only impose adverse environmental impacts and application costs for farmers, but also negatively affect overall crop production levels.

Read the article in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.0138

21/08/2025

Driven by a push towards innovations in nano-optics and photonics, the use of cutting-edge materials and the drive to extend wireless technologies, the latest issue of Philosophical Transactions A highlights the development of a class of analytically grounded full-wave methods and their applications in computational electromagnetics.

Read the full issue:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rsta/2025/383/2303

20/08/2025

The origin of animals (metazoans) from a unicellular ancestor is a crucial event in the history of life on Earth. Microbial holozoans are the closest unicellular relatives of animals. They share a substantial gene repertoire with animals and exhibit complex life cycles. Studying these organisms is crucial for understanding the evolution of multicellularity, and significant progress has been made in uncovering key aspects of the biology of the four microbial holozoans lineages: choanoflagellates, filastereans, ichthyosporeans and corallochytreans. Understanding how animals evolved from their single-celled ancestors requires tools that allow scientists to investigate the function of individual genes across diverse organisms. One of the most powerful tools for this is CRISPR genome editing, but until now, it hadn’t been applied to all groups of unicellular relatives of animals. A new study closes this gap by establishing CRISPR editing in Corallochytrium limacisporum, a little-known microbe that represents a uniquely early branch in the lineage leading to animals. This opens the door to exploring the full range of genomic innovations that shaped the origins of animal life.

Read the methods and techniques article in Open Biology:

Microbial holozoans are the closest unicellular relatives of animals. They share a substantial gene repertoire with animals and exhibit complex life cycles. Studying these organisms is crucial for understanding the evolution of multicellularity, and ...

19/08/2025

William Henry Lang's discoveries led to the landmark paper, ‘On the plant-remains from the Downtonian of England and Wales', in which he revealed a diversity of small fossil organisms of great simplicity that shed light on the nature of the earliest known land plants. These and subsequent discoveries have taken on new relevance as botanists seek to understand the plant genome and the early evolution of fundamental organ systems.

To mark the 360th anniversary of the Philosophical Transactions, we're spotlighting landmark papers. View William Henry Lang's 1937 paper in the Royal Society Journals Archive:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.1937.0004

18/08/2025

Researchers have discovered microtubes of fungal origin in the bones of the marine reptile Keichousaurus from the Middle Triassic of China. Microscopic and micro-CT analyses revealed hyphae-like structures and potential fossilized spores. These saprobic fungi decomposed the remains of the marine reptile, releasing calcium and adsorbing fluorine. The fungi promote the formation of fluorite within microtubes. This is the earliest evidence of fungal-induced biomineralization within fossil bones. It demonstrates that some Middle Triassic fungi were capable of impacting global biogeochemical cycling by taking up substantial amounts of fluorine.

Read the article in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.0486

17/08/2025

Giant mice on small islands. Island gigantism is a phenomenon where small land animals show larger body sizes on islands than on the mainland. While this trend is observed globally, the influence of biogeography and ecology on body size is not well understood. Researchers found evidence of island gigantism in Deer Mouse populations on the Gulf Islands in British Columbia, Canada. Their data suggest that smaller land areas, such as islands, harbour fewer predators, which in turn leads to larger mouse body size. This pattern indicates that predators and island size play roles in shaping body size.

Read the article in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.1201

16/08/2025

Biology Letters authors describe a predation or scavenging event suggesting a medium-sized caiman (possibly Purussaurus neivensis) was consumed a large terror bird. The leg bone from a terror bird had four pits inflicted in the cortical bone, and no signs of healing, suggesting it did not survive this event.

Read the BBC article here:
https://bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8d2j195yo

Read the full Biology Letters paper here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0113

Terror birds could be taller than a human and had powerful legs and hooked, flesh-ripping beaks.

16/08/2025

Hummingbirds learn the visual landmarks surrounding a flower after only a single visit. Tracking technologies like GPS have led to the development of new ways of analysing animal movement, but these techniques are rarely used by other behavioural researchers. To examine how movement analyses might benefit animal cognition research, scientists combined statistical models developed to analyse tracking data with behavioural experiments in wild hummingbirds. Both the movement models and traditional measures found that hummingbirds learn the visual landmarks surrounding a flower after only a single visit, with the models providing new insights into how landmarks shaped wider searching behaviour. The research suggests that these statistical models can be a powerful tool to study animal cognition.

Read the article in Proceedings B:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.0717