Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

We have little knowledge of how climatic variation (and by proxy, habitat variation) influences

the phylogenetic structure of tropical communities. Here, we quantified the phylogenetic

structure of mammal communities in Africa to investigate how community structure

varies with respect to climate and species richness variation across the continent. In addition,

we investigated how phylogenetic patterns vary across carnivores, primates, and ungulates.

We predicted that climate would differentially affect the structure of communities

from different clades due to between-clade biological variation. We examined 203 communities

using two metrics, the net relatedness (NRI) and nearest taxon (NTI) indices. We

used simultaneous autoregressive …

Hosts and parasites co-evolve, with each lineage exerting selective pressures on the other. Thus, parasites may influence host life-history characteristics, such as longevity, and simultaneously host life-history may influence parasite diversity. If parasite burden causes increased mortality, we expect a negative association between host longevity and parasite species richness. Alternatively, if long-lived species represent a more stable environment for parasite establishment, host longevity and parasite species richness may show a positive association. We tested these two opposing predictions in carnivores, primates and terrestrial ungulates using phylogenetic comparative methods and controlling for the potentially confounding effects of sampling effort and body …