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Earthworms feed on organic matter present at the soil surface or within the soil. Thus, its distribution in the soil profile is likely to greatly influence earthworm behavior and, in turn, their burrow system. To test this idea, two anecic and two endogeic earthworm species were introduced into repacked soil cores (depth = 30 cm) upper half filled with a top soil containing 4% organic matter (0–15 cm) and lower half filled with a deep soil at 2% organic matter (15–30 cm). Earthworm behavior was studied using X-ray tomography combined with luminophores (colored particulate tracers of 63–125 μm size) placed at 0, 3, and 12 cm depth, a method widely used in sediment ecology. We observed that anecic and endogeic earthworms had contrasting reactions to the conditions with only endogeic species burrowing more intensively in the upper part. From a quantitative point of view, only a few percent of luminophores were displaced. However, luminophore displacements also provided qualitative information to complement the tomography: (i) endogeic species and especially Aporrectodea caliginosa bioturbated the most soil close to the surface (3 cm depth) and (ii) the two anecic species influenced the luminophore distribution differentially with Lumbricus terrestris displacing significantly more luminophores, whatever their initial depth, than Aporrectodea nocturna due to intense surface cast activity. Beyond methodological developments, our study found that endogeic earthworms burrow more in zones with higher organic matter contents and this explains why they are mainly found close to the soil surface in non-tilled soils.

Ionizing radiation can damage organic molecules, causing detrimental effects on human and wildlife health. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (1986) represents the largest release of radioactive material to the environment. An accurate estimation of the current exposure to radiation in wildlife, often reduced to ambient dose rate assessments, is crucial to understand the long-term impact of radiation on living organisms. Here, we present an evaluation of the sources and variation of current exposure to radiation in breeding Eastern tree frogs ( Hyla orientalis ) males living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Total absorbed dose rates in H. orientalis were highly variable, although generally below widely used thresholds considered harmful for animal health. Internal exposure was the main source of absorbed dose rate (81% on average), with 90 Sr being the main contributor (78% of total dose rate, on average). These results highlight the importance of assessing both internal and external exposure levels in order to perform a robust evaluation of the exposure to radiation in wildlife. Further studies incorporating life-history, ecological, and evolutionary traits are needed to fully evaluate the effects that these exposure levels can have in amphibians and other taxa inhabiting radio-contaminated environments.

Many bees, butterflies, birds, bats and primates are known to forage on familiar plant resources by visiting them in a stable and repeatable order called “traplines”. Here we report the existence of trapline foraging in wasps, the Japanese yellow hornets. We monitored the movement patterns of wild individually marked hornets collecting sucrose solution on four artificial flowers placed in their home range. After thirty consecutive foraging bouts, all the hornets had developed a repeatable flower visitation sequence. Using two different arrays of flowers, we also show that hornets consistently increased their foraging efficiency with experience. However, they did not always use the shortest path to visit all the flowers, often favoring movements between nearest-neighbour options rather than minimizing overall travel distance. Our study thus adds nectar-foraging wasps to the list of animals that exhibit trapline foraging, thereby significantly broadening the scope for comparative research in multi-destination route learning and memory.

Outcrossing can be advantageous in a changing environment because it promotes the purge of deleterious mutations and increases the genetic diversity within a population, which may improve population persistence and evolutionary potential. Some species may, therefore, switch their reproductive mode from inbreeding to outcrossing when under environmental stress. This switch may have consequences on the demographic dynamics and evolutionary trajectory of populations. For example, it may directly influence the sex ratio of a population. However, much remains to be discovered about the mechanisms and evolutionary implications of sex ratio changes in a population in response to environmental stress. Populations of the androdioecious nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, are composed of selfing hermaphrodites and rare males. Here, we investigate the changes in the sex ratio of C. elegans populations exposed to radioactive pollution for 60 days or around 20 generations. We experimentally exposed populations to three levels of ionizing radiation (i.e., 0, 1.4, and 50 mGy.h−1). We then performed reciprocal transplant experiments to evaluate genetic divergence between populations submitted to different treatments. Finally, we used a mathematical model to examine the evolutionary mechanisms that could be responsible for the change in sex ratio. Our results showed an increase in male frequency in irradiated populations, and this effect increased with the dose rate. The model showed that an increase in male fertilization success or a decrease in hermaphrodite self‐fertilization could explain this increase in the frequency of males. Moreover, males persisted in populations after transplant back into the control conditions. These results suggested selection favoring outcrossing under irradiation conditions. This study shows that ionizing radiation can sustainably alter the reproductive strategy of a population, likely impacting its long‐term evolutionary history. This study highlights the need to evaluate the impact of pollutants on the reproductive strategies of populations when assessing the ecological risks.

Despite the ubiquity of pollutants in the environment, their long‐term ecological consequences are not always clear and still poorly studied. This is the case concerning the radioactive contamination of the environment following the major nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Notwithstanding the implications of evolutionary processes on the population status, few studies concern the evolution of organisms chronically exposed to ionizing radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Here, we examined genetic markers for 19 populations of Eastern tree frog (Hyla orientalis) sampled in the Chernobyl region about thirty years after the nuclear power plant accident to investigate microevolutionary processes ongoing in local populations. Genetic diversity estimated from nuclear and mitochondrial markers showed an absence of genetic erosion and higher mitochondrial diversity in tree frogs from the Chernobyl exclusion zone compared to other European populations. Moreover, the study of haplotype network permitted us to decipher the presence of an independent recent evolutionary history of Chernobyl exclusion zone's Eastern tree frogs caused by an elevated mutation rate compared to other European populations. By fitting to our data a model of haplotype network evolution, we suspected that Eastern tree frog populations in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have a high mitochondrial mutation rate and small effective population sizes. These data suggest that Eastern tree frog populations might offset the impact of deleterious mutations because of their large clutch size, but also question the long‐term impact of ionizing radiation on the status of other species living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Background Individual functional modifications shape the ability of wildlife populations to cope with anthropogenic environmental changes. But instead of adaptive response, human-altered environments can generate a succession of deleterious functional changes leading to the extinction of the population. To study how persistent anthropogenic changes impacted local species’ population status, we characterised population structure, genetic diversity and individual response of gene expression in the tree frog Hyla orientalis along a gradient of radioactive contamination around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Results We detected lower effective population size in populations most exposed to ionizing radiation in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that is not compensated by migrations from surrounding areas. We also highlighted a decreased body condition of frogs living in the most contaminated area, a distinctive transcriptomics signature and stop-gained mutations in genes involved in energy metabolism. While the association with dose will remain correlational until further experiments, a body of evidence suggests the direct or indirect involvement of radiation exposure in these changes. Conclusions Despite ongoing migration and lower total dose rates absorbed than at the time of the accident, our results demonstrate that Hyla orientalis specimens living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are still undergoing deleterious changes, emphasizing the long-term impacts of the nuclear disaster.

Background Human actions have altered natural ecosystems worldwide. Among the many pollutants released to the environment, ionizing radiation can cause severe damage at different molecular and functional levels. The accident in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (1986) caused the largest release of ionizing radiation to the environment in human history. Here, we examined the impact of the current exposure to ionizing radiation on blood physiology biomarkers of adult males of the Eastern tree frog ( Hyla orientalis ) inhabiting within and outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. We measured the levels of eight blood parameters (sodium, potassium, chloride, ionized calcium, total carbon dioxide, glucose, urea nitrogen, and anion gap), physiological markers of homeostasis, as well as of liver and kidney function. Results Levels of blood physiology biomarkers did not vary in function of the current exposure of tree frogs to ionizing radiation within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Physiological blood levels were similar in frogs inhabiting Chernobyl (both in areas with medium-high or low radiation) than in tree frogs living outside Chernobyl exposed only to background radiation levels. Conclusions The observed lack of effects of current radiation levels on blood biomarkers can be a consequence of the low levels of radiation currently experienced by Chernobyl tree frogs, but also to the fact that our sampling was restricted to active breeding males, i.e. potentially healthy adult individuals. Despite the clear absence of effects of current radiation levels on physiological blood parameters in tree frogs, more research covering different life stages and ecological scenarios is still needed to clarify the impact of ionizing radiation on the physiology, ecology, and dynamics of wildlife inhabiting radioactive-contaminated areas.

Some populations quickly adapt to strong and novel selection pressures caused by anthropogenic stressors. However, this short‐term evolutionary response to novel and harsh environmental conditions may lead to adaptation costs, and evaluating these costs is important if we want to understand the evolution of resistance to anthropogenic stressors. In this experimental evolution study, we exposed Caenorhabditis elegans populations to uranium (U populations), salt (NaCl populations) and alternating uranium/salt treatments (U/NaCl populations) and to a control environment (C populations), over 22 generations. In parallel, we ran common‐garden and reciprocal‐transplant experiments to assess the adaptive costs for populations that have evolved in the different environmental conditions. Our results showed rapid evolutionary changes in life history characteristics of populations exposed to the different pollution regimes. Furthermore, adaptive costs depended on the type of pollutant: pollution‐adapted populations had lower fitness than C populations, when the populations were returned to their original environment. Fitness in uranium environments was lower for NaCl populations than for U populations. In contrast, fitness in salt environments was similar between U and NaCl populations. Moreover, fitness of U/NaCl populations showed similar or higher fitness in both the uranium and the salt environments compared to populations adapted to constant uranium or salt environments. Our results show that adaptive evolution to a particular stressor can lead to either adaptive costs or benefits once in contact with another stressor. Furthermore, we did not find any evidence that adaptation to alternating stressors was associated with additional adaption costs. This study highlights the need to incorporate adaptive cost assessments when undertaking ecological risk assessments of pollutants.

The nuclear accident in the Fukushima prefecture released a large amount of artificial radionuclides that might have short- and long-term biological effects on wildlife. Ionizing radiation can be a harmful source of reactive oxygen species, and previous studies have already shown reduced fitness effects in exposed animals in Chernobyl. Due to their potential health benefits, carotenoid pigments might be used by animals to limit detrimental effects of ionizing radiation exposure. Here, we examined concentrations of carotenoids in blood (i.e. a snapshot of levels in circulation), liver (endogenous carotenoid reserves), and the vocal sac skin (sexual signal) in relation to the total radiation dose rates absorbed by individual (TDR from 0.2 to 34 µGy/h) Japanese tree frogs ( Hyla japonica ). We found high within-site variability of TDRs, but no significant effects of the TDR on tissue carotenoid levels, suggesting that carotenoid distribution in amphibians might be less sensitive to ionizing radiation exposure than in other organisms or that the potential deleterious effects of radiation exposure might be less significant or more difficult to detect in Fukushima than in Chernobyl due to, among other things, differences in the abundance and mixture of each radionuclide.

Background Adaptation to a stressor can lead to costs on other traits. These costs play an unavoidable role on fitness and influence the evolutionary trajectory of a population. Host defense seems highly subject to these costs, possibly because its maintenance is energetically costly but essential to the survival. When assessing the ecological risk related to pollution, it is therefore relevant to consider these costs to evaluate the evolutionary consequences of stressors on populations. However, to the best of our knowledge, the effects of evolution in irradiate environment on host defense have never been studied. Using an experimental evolution approach, we analyzed fitness across 20 transfers (about 20 generations) in Caenorhabditis elegans populations exposed to 0, 1.4, and 50.0 mGy.h − 1 of 137 Cs gamma radiation. Then, populations from transfer 17 were placed in the same environmental conditions without irradiation (i.e., common garden) for about 10 generations before being exposed to the bacterial parasite Serratia marcescens and their survival was estimated to study host defense. Finally, we studied the presence of an evolutionary trade-off between fitness of irradiated populations and host defense. Results We found a lower fitness in both irradiated treatments compared to the control ones, but fitness increased over time in the 50.0 mGy.h − 1 , suggesting a local adaptation of the populations. Then, the survival rate of C. elegans to S. marcescens was lower for common garden populations that had previously evolved under both irradiation treatments, indicating that evolution in gamma-irradiated environment had a cost on host defense of C. elegans . Furthermore, we showed a trade-off between standardized fitness at the end of the multigenerational experiment and survival of C. elegans to S. marcescens in the control treatment, but a positive correlation between the two traits for the two irradiated treatments. These results indicate that among irradiated populations, those most sensitive to ionizing radiation are also the most susceptible to the pathogen. On the other hand, other irradiated populations appear to have evolved cross-resistance to both stress factors. Conclusions Our study shows that adaptation to an environmental stressor can be associated with an evolutionary cost when a new stressor appears, even several generations after the end of the first stressor. Among irradiated populations, we observed an evolution of resistance to ionizing radiation, which also appeared to provide an advantage against the pathogen. On the other hand, some of the irradiated populations seemed to accumulate sensitivities to stressors. This work provides a new argument to show the importance of considering evolutionary changes in ecotoxicology and for ecological risk assessment.