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Amino acids are important nutrients for animals, reflected in conserved internal pathways in vertebrates and invertebrates for monitoring cellular levels of these compounds. In mammals, sensory cells and metabotropic glutamate receptor-related taste receptors that detect environmental sources of amino acids in food are also well-characterised. By contrast, it is unclear how insects perceive this class of molecules through peripheral chemosensory mechanisms. Here we investigate amino acid sensing in Drosophila melanogaster larvae, which feed ravenously to support their rapid growth. We show that larvae display diverse behaviours (attraction, aversion, neutral) towards different amino acids, which depend upon stimulus concentration. Some of these behaviours require IR76b, a member of the variant ionotropic glutamate receptor repertoire of invertebrate chemoreceptors. IR76b is broadly expressed in larval taste neurons, suggesting a role as a co-receptor. We identify a subpopulation of these neurons that displays physiological activation by some, but not all, amino acids, and which mediate suppression of feeding by high concentrations of at least a subset of these compounds. Our data reveal the first elements of a sophisticated neuronal and molecular substrate by which these animals detect and behave towards external sources of amino acids.

The scleractinian coral Porites lutea, an important reef-building coral on western Indian Ocean reefs (WIO), is affected by a newly-reported white syndrome (WS) the Porites white patch syndrome (PWPS). Histopathology and culture-independent molecular techniques were used to characterise the microbial communities associated with this emerging disease. Microscopy showed extensive tissue fragmentation generally associated with ovoid basophilic bodies resembling bacterial aggregates. Results of 16S rRNA sequence analysis revealed a high variability between bacterial communities associated with PWPS-infected and healthy tissues in P. lutea, a pattern previously reported in other coral diseases such as black band disease (BBD), white band disease (WBD) and white plague diseases (WPD). Furthermore, substantial variations in bacterial communities were observed at the different sampling locations, suggesting that there is no strong bacterial association in Porites lutea on WIO reefs. Several sequences affiliated with potential pathogens belonging to the Vibrionaceae and Rhodobacteraceae were identified, mainly in PWPS-infected coral tissues. Among them, only two ribotypes affiliated to Shimia marina (NR043300.1) and Vibrio hepatarius (NR025575.1) were consistently found in diseased tissues from the three geographically distant sampling localities. The role of these bacterial species in PWPS needs to be tested experimentally.

Models of the future of coral reefs are potentially sensitive to theoretical assumptions, variable selectivity, interactions, and scales. A number of these aspects were evaluated using boosted regression tree models of numbers of coral taxa trained on ~1000 field surveys and 35 spatially complete influential environmental proxies at moderate scales (~6.25 km2). Models explored influences of climate change, water quality, direct human‐resource extraction, and variable selection processes. We examined the predictions for numbers of coral taxa using all variables and compared them to models based on variables commonly used to predict climate change and human influences (eight and nine variables). Results indicated individual temperature variables alone had lower predictive ability (R2 < 2%–7%) compared to human influence variables (6%–18%) but overall climate had a higher training–testing fit (70%) than the human influence (63%) model. The full variable model had the highest fit to the full data (27 variables; R2 = 85%) and indicated the strongly interactive and complex role of environmental and human influence variables when making moderate‐scale biodiversity predictions. Projecting changes using Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) 2050 Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP2.6 and 8.5) water temperature predictions indicated high local variability and fewer negative effects than predictions made by coarse scale threshold and niche models. The persistence of coral reefs over periods of rapid climate change is likely to be caused by smaller scale variability that is poorly simulated with coarse scale modeled predictions.

The brain adaptively integrates present sensory input, past experience, and options for future action. The insect mushroom body exemplifies how a central brain structure brings about such integration. Here we use a combination of systematic single-cell labeling, connectomics, transgenic silencing, and activation experiments to study the mushroom body at single-cell resolution, focusing on the behavioral architecture of its input and output neurons (MBINs and MBONs), and of the mushroom body intrinsic APL neuron. Our results reveal the identity and morphology of almost all of these 44 neurons in stage 3 Drosophila larvae. Upon an initial screen, functional analyses focusing on the mushroom body medial lobe uncover sparse and specific functions of its dopaminergic MBINs, its MBONs, and of the GABAergic APL neuron across three behavioral tasks, namely odor preference, taste preference, and associative learning between odor and taste. Our results thus provide a cellular-resolution study case of how brains organize behavior. The mushroom body of Drosophila integrates sensory information with past experience to guide behaviour. Here, the authors provide an atlas of the input and output neurons of the stage 3 larval mushroom body at the single-cell level, and analyse their function in learned and innate behaviours.

Finding food is a vital skill and a constant task for any animal, and associative learning of food-predicting cues gives an advantage in this daily struggle. The strength of the associations between cues and food depends on a number of parameters, such as the salience of the cue, the strength of the food reward and the number of joint cue-food experiences. We investigate what impact the strength of an associative odour-sugar memory has on the microbehaviour of Drosophila melanogaster larvae. We find that larvae form stronger memories with increasing concentrations of sugar or odour, and that these stronger memories manifest themselves in stronger modulations of two aspects of larval microbehaviour, the rate and the direction of lateral reorientation manoeuvres (so-called head casts). These two modulations of larval behaviour are found to be correlated to each other in every experiment performed, which is in line with a model that assumes that both modulations are controlled by a common motor output. Given that the Drosophila larva is a genetically tractable model organism that is well suited to the study of simple circuits at the single-cell level, these analyses can guide future research into the neuronal circuits underlying the translation of associative memories of different strength into behaviour, and may help to understand how these processes are organised in more complex systems.

Coral reefs reach their southernmost limits in the southwestern Indian Ocean in Maputaland, South Africa. Here, we investigate the recent global coral bleaching event of 2016, the thermal dynamics of these marginal high-latitude reefs and the potential environmental factors regulating the responses of coral communities. Pre-, peak- and post-bleaching surveys of over 9850 coral colonies from 29 genera were undertaken over 3 years across 14 sites spanning 120 km of coastline using point-intercept and visual bleaching index survey methodologies. Bleaching data were related to several environmental variables including temperature, degree heating weeks (DHW), depth, latitude, and upwelling intensity. These reefs have experienced a history of relatively low thermal stress based on DHW. Long-term in situ temperature records nevertheless showed no obvious trend of increase. In situ temperatures also displayed poor relationships, with temperatures predicted by the Representative Concentration Pathway models. Mild coral bleaching with no significant mortality was recorded across sites with taxon-specific bleaching responses evident. Latitude and cumulative daily DHW were significantly related to the bleaching index whereas depth and interactions of depth with latitude and DHW were not. While upwelling of cooler water may offer some refuge to coral communities, especially in the Central and Southern Reef Complexes where it is more pronounced, this may only be transient as the upwelled water may also experience some degree of warming in future, thereby limiting such protection from global warming.

Soft corals collected around Mayotte in 2011 comprised 24 genera and 57 identifiable species of Alcyonacea; two genera and three species were added to the list from a 1997 collection made for a natural products study. When compared with other western Indian Ocean (WIO) data, Mayotte’s alcyonacean fauna is the richest, and the island potentially comprises a regional biodiversity hotspot for this group. Mayotte has the largest barrier reef in the WIO and, considering the oceanography of the Mozambique Channel, this alcyonacean biodiversity may feed into the system and merits conservation.

Coral communities display spatial patterns. These patterns can manifest along a coastline as well as across the continental shelf due to ecological interactions and environmental gradients. Several abiotic surrogates for environmental variables are hypothesised to structure high-latitude coral communities in South Africa along and across its narrow shelf and were investigated using a correlative approach that considered spatial autocorrelation. Surveys of sessile communities were conducted on 17 reefs and related to depth, distance to high tide, distance to the continental shelf edge and to submarine canyons. All four environmental variables were found to correlate significantly with community composition, even after the effects of space were removed. The environmental variables accounted for 13% of the variation in communities; 77% of this variation was spatially structured. Spatially structured environmental variation unrelated to the environmental variables accounted for 39% of the community variation. The Northern Reef Complex appears to be less affected by oceanic factors and may undergo less temperature variability than the Central and Southern Complexes; the first is mentioned because it had the lowest canyon effect and was furthest from the continental shelf, whilst the latter complexes had the highest canyon effects and were closest to the shelf edge. These characteristics may be responsible for the spatial differences in the coral communities.

The only property of reinforcement insects are commonly thought to learn about is its value. We show that larval Drosophila not only remember the value of reinforcement (How much?), but also its quality (What?). This is demonstrated both within the appetitive domain by using sugar vs amino acid as different reward qualities, and within the aversive domain by using bitter vs high-concentration salt as different qualities of punishment. From the available literature, such nuanced memories for the quality of reinforcement are unexpected and pose a challenge to present models of how insect memory is organized. Given that animals as simple as larval Drosophila, endowed with but 10,000 neurons, operate with both reinforcement value and quality, we suggest that both are fundamental aspects of mnemonic processing—in any brain. Actions have consequences; positive consequences or rewards make it more likely that a behavior will be repeated, while negative consequences or punishments can stop a behavior occurring again. Neuroscientists commonly refer to such rewards and punishments as ‘reinforcement’. Fruit flies that are given a reward of sugar when they experience an odor will move towards the odor in later tests. However, in 2011, research revealed that if the flies were given at least the same amount of sugar in the tests as they were rewarded with during the earlier training, the flies stopped moving towards the odor. This suggests that fruit flies can recall how strong a reward was in the past and compare this remembered strength to the current reward on offer; fruit flies will only continue searching if they expect to gain a larger reward by doing so. Insects were commonly thought to only learn the amount or ‘value’ of reinforcement, but not recall what kind or ‘quality’ of reward (or punishment) they had experienced. Now Schleyer et al.—including some of the researchers involved in the 2011 work—challenge and extend this notion and show that fruit fly larvae can remember both the value and quality of rewards and punishments. Fruit fly larvae were trained to expect a reward of sugar when exposed to one odor and nothing when exposed to a different odor. Consistent with the previous results, the larvae moved towards the first odor in the tests where no additional reward was provided. Moreover, the larvae did not move towards the odor in later tests if an equal or greater amount of sugar was provided during the testing stage. Schleyer et al. then took larvae that had been trained to expect a sugar reward and gave them a different, but equally valuable, reward during the testing stage—in this case, the reward was an amino acid called aspartic acid. These experiments revealed that most of the larvae continued to move towards the sugar-associated odor in search of the sugar reward. This indicates that the larvae were able to remember the quality of the reward, namely that it was sugar rather than aspartic acid. Schleyer et al. performed similar experiments, and observed similar results, when using two different punishments: bitter-tasting quinine and high concentrations of salt. These findings show that experiencing an odor along with taste reinforcement could set up a memory specific to the quality of reinforcement in fruit fly larvae. Given the numerical simplicity of a larva's brain—which contains only 10,000 neurons—it is likely that other animals can also recall both the value and quality of a reward or punishment. However, understanding how such specificity comes about should be easier in the larva's simple brain.

The Mozambique Channel between south-east Africa and Madagascar potentially forms a barrier to larval dispersal and thus gene flow across the channel, even in species with long larval lifespans such as spiny lobsters. The DNA of 181 specimens of Panulirus homarus rubellus Berry, 1974, collected from six sites along the African coast and a site in Madagascar, was sequenced (591 base pairs) to investigate gene flow along the coast and across the channel. Bayesian methods were implemented to infer genetic structure and relatedness. A total of 112 haplotypes were recovered, of which 78% were unique. Samples from Africa and Madagascar did not share any haplotypes and differed by 78 mutations and 3% DNA divergence. These distinct lineages suggest an absence of contemporary gene flow across the Mozambique Channel. Shallow genetic structure along approximately 1000 km of African coastline comprised combinations of seven distinct lineages but did not correspond to known biogeographic provinces. The African lineage appeared to be ancestral, and the source population for the Madagascan clade. Genetic isolation in refuges during glacial periods, followed by subsequent range expansions and secondary contact, may account for the high diversity in the African lineages.