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Ming Liu

@mingpapilio.bsky.social

Postdoc at Oxford with Kevin Foster | PhD from West group | Theoretical Biologist | Eco-evolutionary dynamics, microbial communities, cooperation, and fluctuating selection https://mingpapilio.github.io/

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Ming Liu@mingpapilio.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New paper is out! Disease is often seen as a cost of social life. But can it also shape how complex societies evolve? Here, we use mathematical models to study social immunity: collective disease defence in ants, termites, bees and other group-living insects. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

pnas.org

Ming Liu@mingpapilio.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It was a pleasure to do some cool modelling with this fascinating brood parasite system, check it out on PLoS Biol!

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · 5mo ago

Brood #parasitism involves trade-off in host error rates from accepting foreign eggs & rejecting their own. @tdixit.bsky.social &co reveal advantages when egg trait distributions are categorical (not continuous); implications for other co-evolutionary arms races @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4kPKjJP

Eggs laid by the zitting cisticola, a small warbler we studied in southern Zambia. Zitting cisticolas lay beautiful bottle-shaped nests in tall grass, and each female produces a consistent egg type. However, females vary in whether their eggs are white or blue, whether they have small speckles or large blotches, and whether these markings are pale brown or dark brown (almost black). This variation in egg colour and pattern is a defence against a brood parasite, the cuckoo finch. Cuckoo finch eggs are good mimics of most of the zitting cisticola egg categories, and thus can trick the cisticolas into accepting the egg and raising an imposter chick. However, a cuckoo finch laying eggs that perfectly mimic blue cisticola eggs with dark brown speckles will often (by chance) end up laying its egg in a clutch of white eggs, or a clutch with pale brown markings. This egg will be easily spotted by the eagle-eyed cisticola, who will promptly remove it from the nest. Image credit: Tanmay Dixit
Ming Liu@mingpapilio.bsky.social · 6mo ago

How do temperature regimes shape trait diversity in communities? Does variability promote more specialists or more generalists? Our new Nature Communications paper tackles this with eco-evo simulations + 653 moth species across latitudinal and elevational gradients. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Warmer environments harbor greater thermal trait diversity in moth assemblages - Nature Communications

Climate limits where insects can live and which species can coexist. Using thermal tolerances of 653 moths on Asian mountains, this study shows warmer temperatures broaden thermal tolerance traits div...

nature.com