Russian scientists have developed a new set of primers for DNA identification of non-native fish species in the Volga-Kama basin. Using these primers, they traced the genetic variability in 31 fish species and compiled a reference library containing marker sequences of the region's invaders. Under natural conditions, the dispersal of animals is limited by their radius of individual activity, and for most species this radius is relatively small. Hydrobionts use waterways for settlement. Human activity strongly influences the movement of aquatic organisms, contributing to biological invasions. A team of scientists from the Institute of Inland Water Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Ecology and Evolution Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences have optimized a method for identifying alien fish species in the Volga and Kama rivers. Work published in Water. The Volga River was involved in a colossal hydro-construction program. There are nine large reservoirs on the Volga. Kama suffered less - there are only three large reservoirs on it. This is naturally reflected in the share of alien species: at present, the share of alien fish species in the Volga reservoirs ranges from 8% to 32%, for the Kama reservoirs it is 2–16%. Alien species can upset the balance of an ecosystem, so one of the key tasks in monitoring biological invasions is the rapid and accurate identification of the invader. DNA identification methods are best suited for solving this problem.

For fish from lakes of high latitudes, the formation of pairs of sympatric forms is characteristic, which separate the resources of the bottom and the water column. The fish begin to feed on pelagic plankton (its consumers) or benthic invertebrates, form a specific adaptive morphology, and disperse according to spawning sites (terms). As a result, reproductive isolation rapidly develops between sympatric forms, and inherited differences begin to accumulate. Similar pairs of nascent species have been found in abundance among salmon and whitefish from post-glacial lakes.

Scientists of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS (IEE RAS) and Moscow State University for the first time evaluated the role of arthropods falling from trees to the soil surface, finding out that they account for up to 7% of the flow of organic matter from the forest canopy. The data obtained will make it possible to better predict the stability of terrestrial ecosystems, the press service of the Ministry of Education and Science writes. The results of the study were published by the scientific journal Scientific Reports.  A significant part of the invertebrates living in the tree crowns, due to various reasons, falls on the soil surface. This phenomenon is called "arthropod rain". Fallen invertebrates are consumed by organisms living on the soil surface. Thus, the detrital, that is, located in the soil, the food web receives an additional source of energy. "According to the estimates obtained, in the forests of the temperate zone, up to 7% of the flow of organic matter from the forest canopy is "arthropod rain". And, apparently, this amount is enough to feed, for example, such a large group as spiders.<...> Thus, "arthropod rain" makes a significant contribution to maintaining the functional unity of soil food webs and maintains the diversity of soil inhabitants in forest ecosystems.

  A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS supervises a project to collect information about the vegetation of the Arctic region in an accessible database (AVA) - https://avarus.space. The purpose of the archive is to unify and standardize data collected by geobotanists. The initiative has been approved by the Working Group on the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna and the International Arctic Science Committee. At present, the Arctic Vegetation Archive contains about 30,000 geobotanical descriptions. Work on the Archive continues, the data is constantly updated. The main part of the data is descriptions of the vegetation of Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia, stored in regional databases. The archive and its individual parts are available for download via the web interface. To get the full functionality of the site, registration is required - https://avarus.space/ru/instructions/ Previously published data can be downloaded directly from the site, unpublished data - on the author’s permission. Technical support is provided by the Department of Computer Engineering at MIEM HSE. The implementation was supported by the RFBR grant N 18-04-01010 A. In the photo: the Gulf of Ob Author of the photo: Ksenia Ermokhina, Ph.D., senior researcher, V.N. Sukachev laboratory of biogeocenology of IEE RAS

Under the chairmanship of the Governor of the Astrakhan region Igor Babushkin, the expert community discussed the topic of preserving the population of the unique antelope that lives in the local steppes - the saiga. The event was organized with the support of the service of nature management and environmental protection of the region. — Increasing the level of environmental well-being is one of the priority areas for the development of the Astrakhan region. Among the most important tasks is the conservation of natural resources, including the saiga population. It is gratifying that the number of these Red Book animals in our region has been increasing over the past few years,” said Igor Babushkin, opening the round table. He thanked LUKOIL for supporting the saiga conservation program in Kalmykia and the Astrakhan region. It is provided as part of an agreement between the oil company and the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation: LUKOIL will allocate 30.5 million rubles to preserve the population of the relic antelope until 2024. This year, at the expense of the oil company, in particular, conditions for watering will be improved - water intake wells in the Stepnoy reserve have been cleared. In addition, using unmanned aerial vehicles, scientists will be able to assess the size and structure of the saiga population.

Preparations for the opening of the Joint Russian-Ethiopian Center for Biological Research in Ethiopia began thanks to the instructions of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, but so far the project has not passed into the stage of practical implementation. This was announced at a meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences by the Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Ecology of Aquatic Communities and Invasions of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS Yuri Dgebuadze in the report “Russian biologists in Africa: the experience of the Russian-Ethiopian expedition of the RAS”. “The work has moved a little now, a package of documents has been prepared by the Academy, everything has been given to the ministry, but nothing has started yet, and funding has not been opened,” the head of the General Biology Section of the Biological Sciences Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences described the situation. He recalled that the idea of ​​organizing a new structure arose in 2017. It was assumed that the Joint Russian-Ethiopian Center for Biological Research (SRECBI) would be a new level of cooperation on the basis of the Joint Russian-Ethiopian Biological Expedition (JREBE), a long-term project of the Biological Sciences Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Ethiopia, which has been continuously operating for 35 years. The agreement on the work of the Expedition is periodically - usually every 5 years - renewed.

Fusariosis of the corn ear is an important disease that reduces yields and leads to the accumulation of mycotoxins (T2-toxin, deoxynivalenol and others), which makes wheat and corn grains unsuitable for human consumption or as animal feed. Despite more than a century of history of studying this disease, at the moment there are no sufficiently effective methods for controlling head fusarium. One of the reasons for this is the lack of understanding of the key mechanisms that link the abundance of Fusarium fungi in the soil at the beginning of the growing season with the content of mycotoxins in mature grain. In particular, the interactions of soil invertebrates and Fusarium fungi in the field are poorly studied. “As a result of the experiment, we were able to identify a previously undescribed mechanism of ear Fusarium infection by the transfer of pathogenic spores by soil invertebrates that make vertical migrations to feed on winter wheat pollen during flowering,” explained one of the authors of the study, a researcher at the Laboratory of Soil Zoology and General entomology, Ph.D., Anton Alexandrovich Goncharov. The results of the study are published in the international journal Agronomy: https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy12020393 PICTURE: On the left: Fusarium biomass in grain Herpetobiont activity Number of soil microanthropods On the right: amount of T-2 toxin in the soil D. Schmidti earthworm biomass Number of soil mites (Mesostigmata)  

A Persian leopard (Panthera pardus ciscaucasica), also known as the Caucasian panther, was filmed in the Sharoy area of Chechnya. The video was sent by a graduate student of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS, having received it from his Chechen colleagues. Together with the project's scientific support team, he is studying the possibilities of restoring the Caucasian leopard in the North Caucasus. Video materials are already being studied by specialists. “For us, this news is certainly positive, pleasant. However, we have yet to determine if this leopard is one of the previously released individuals, or if it is a natural specimen, like the recently seen male in Kabardino-Balkaria. In the near future, more detailed information will be presented at a meeting of the Section on the Persian leopard at the Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia. The restoration of the main predator for the Caucasus has already united a huge number of people who advocate the preservation of our unique nature, and we are always glad to pay attention to this problem,” said Vyacheslav Vladimirovich Rozhnov, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Director of the Program for the restoration of the Persian leopard in the Caucasus.

As we enter the Year of the Tiger of the Chinese calendar, The A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS (IEE RAS) has made a significant contribution to the restoration of the population of this predator in Russia. As part of a project supported by the Russian Geographical Society, the Institute has restored the tiger population in the northwest of its range - in the Jewish Autonomous and Amur regions. The tigress Zolushka (“Cinderella”) is the first tiger that was released by specialists from the IEE RAS and colleagues from the Special Inspectorate "Tiger" in 2013. It was she who became the matriarch of the recreated group. In the winter of 2012, at the age of about 4-5 months, she was found emaciated in the forest, with frostbite on the tip of her tail, with minimal chances of survival. Thanks to the capabilities of the Center for the Rehabilitation and Reintroduction of Tigers and Other Rare Animals, which was built in 2012 at the expense of the project, it became possible to fully work with the tigress. Specialists worked for two years to rehabilitate the animal, grow it to an age at which it is possible for a tigress to survive on her own in nature, and release her on the territory of the Bastak nature reserve. The work was carried out strictly in accordance with the stages of the technology for returning orphaned tiger cubs to nature, specially developed by scientists from IEE RAS. Cinderella

Elephant shrews, without exaggeration, can be called one of the most amazing creatures that make up the superorder Afrotheria. These small and extremely active animals lead a predominantly twilight or diurnal lifestyle, using a system of complex paths to move. All modern species of elephant shrews belong to the Macroscelididae family, in which we distinguish two branches - Rhynchocyoninae and Macroscelidinae. It was previously believed that the rufous elephant shrew (Galegeeska rufescens), widespread in the Horn of Africa, is a representative of the genus Elephantulus, belonging to the tribe Elephantulini. However, the staff of the Laboratory of Microevolution of Mammals of the IEE RAS, together with colleagues from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, based on the sequences of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, both new material collected by a team of authors in East Africa and available in the GenBank database, managed to show that the East African elephant shrew ( "Elephantulus" rufescens) belongs to the recently described genus Galegeeska of the tribe Macroscelidini. The multilocus phylogenetic analysis of the subfamily Macroscelidinae, carried out by the authors, confirmed the presence of two main radiations in this group, corresponding to the recently described tribes Macroscelidini and Elephantulini, and revealed a much “younger” than previously assumed age of the main diversification events within the Macroscelidea: it was shown that most modern species of this order appeared in the Plio-Pleistocene.

The naked mole-rat is the only eusocial species among mammals, which is a unique model object for a number of areas of evolutionary and medical biology. For the first time, the staff of the Mammalian Microevolution Laboratory of the IEE RAS carried out a comprehensive molecular genetic analysis of this species from geographic localities covering a significant part of its range. The results of the study revealed a high degree of genetic differentiation between the two main evolutionary lineages of the naked mole-rat (eastern and southern) and showed that H. glaber has a pronounced phylogeographic structure. The taxonomic status of these two forms (species or subspecies?) is still uncertain. Based on the obtained genetic data and the results of modeling of ecological niches, a potential scenario of the formation of the modern range of the naked mole-rat has been created. It has been shown that the most important bioclimatic parameters that determine its distribution are the annual amount of precipitation and the amount of precipitation of the wettest season. Zemlemerova E.D., Kostin D.S., Lebedev V.S., Martynov A.A., Gromov A.R., Alexandrov D.Yu., Lavrenchenko L.A., 2021. Genetic diversity of the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber). Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, 59(1): 323-340. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzs.12423

Researcher at the Laboratory for Environmental Monitoring of NPP Regions and Bioindication, Ph.D. Sergey Anatolyevich Simanovsky became a member of a large collaboration of European and American scientists on the cytogenomic study of the guiding role of B chromosomes in male development in Astyanax mexicanus (Characiformes). The results of the study are published in Current Biology (Q1 WoS, IF = 10.834). Part of the work of S.A. Simanovsky was the study of synaptonemal complexes in prophase I of meiosis in A. mexicanus males with B-chromosomes in somatic cells. The presence of single B-chromosomes was also found in spermatocytes. At the pachytene stage of prophase I of meiosis, B chromosomes were identified as univalents that did not interact with autosomal bivalents. This part of the research was carried out at the expense of the RFBR's own grant, which is reflected in the “Acknowledgments” article. The main result of the study was the discovery on the B chromosomes of A. mexicanus of two loci of the gdf6b gene, a putative master gene for sex determination. It was found that gdf6b is expressed only in the testes and determines the development of the male pattern. When this gene is knocked out, a sex change occurs.

It is believed that "worms" are primitive animals that are not capable of complex behavior. However, studies carried out by Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Morphology and Ecology of Marine Invertebrates, IEE RAS T.A. Britaev together with a colleague from the Center for Marine Research of Moscow State University Blanes D. Martin showed that this is far from the case. The results of the experiments demonstrated a striking aggressive behavior in marine symbiotic worms - polychaetes. The scientists studied the influence of changes in the number of hosts on the behavior of the symbiotic polychaete Ophthalmonoe pettibonae living in the tubes of another large burrowing polychaete Chaetopterus sp. The researchers moved the host from their own opaque tube to an artificial one made of transparent plastic, which made it possible to observe the behavior of animals. Experiments have clearly shown that as a result of severe intraspecific collisions, control over the territory, which in this case is the owner, is established by a single individual. This behavior explains the strictly uniform distribution observed in nature: one symbiont in one host. The increase in the number of vacant hosts has not led to a decrease in competition. Moreover, the pursuit of a competitor continued outside the host tube, which for the first time proved the ability of marine invertebrates to control the external territory, including additional hosts. Britayev, T. A. & Martin, D. (2021) Behavioral traits and territoriality in the symbiotic scaleworm Ophthalmonoe pettiboneae. Scientific Reports 11: 12408. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-91810-2  

Emerald ash borer is a devastating pest of ash trees. About 20 years ago, it spread from its homeland - from East Asia - to North America and European Russia and began to settle, destroying millions of ash trees in forests and urban plantations. To date, the ash borer has occupied 19 regions of the European part of Russia and two regions of Ukraine. At the same time, the borer has come close to the borders of the European Union and is included in the list of the 20 most dangerous quarantine pests for the EU. Marina Orlova-Benkovskaya and Andrey Benkovsky, Doctors of Biological Sciences, Senior Researchers at the IEE RAS, made the first prognosis of the potential distribution of the borer in Europe, based on the calculation of heat supply (the sum of effective temperatures). Calculations have shown that in most regions of Europe the heat is quite sufficient for the development of the borer. However, fortunately, in the north - in most regions of the Scandinavian Peninsula, as well as in the northern half of the British Isles - the borer, most likely, will not be able to settle. In the European part of Russia, the ash borer settled as far as St. Petersburg and Yaroslavl. According to the calculations of scientists, the heat conditions will not allow it to travel further north. Ash trees growing in Karelia, the Vologda Oblast and other northern regions will not be affected by the pest.

The Narwhal research project started in 2019, when PJSC Gazprom Neft, together with IEE RAS, arranged for the first expedition to study these animals. Then the "sea unicorns" were found in the archipelago Franz Josef Land. The second expedition, organized by the company and the A. N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS, left Arkhangelsk in July 2021 on the research expedition ship Mikhail Somov. Its goals are to detect narwhals, describe the Russian part of the range, and assess the state of the population. Narwhals are unique in that they prefer areas bordering between water and Arctic ice all year round, not swimming away to warmer areas like most marine mammals. The state of the population of "sea unicorns" can be used to judge the well-being of the Arctic ecosystem, which is why Gazprom Neft PJSC pays great attention to them. PJSC Gazprom Neft, together with IEE RAS, at the TASS site, prepared an interactive long-read website https://spec.tass.ru/narwhal/, where you can get acquainted with the diaries of the expedition, read the conclusions of scientists, watch videos and photos with narwhals.

The documentary film about the second season of the expedition "Master of the Arctic" will allow the observation of the Arctic islands from the height of the L-410 turboflight, the blue ice of the Barents Sea - from the legendary ship "Mikhail Somov"; learn how people live and work on expeditions and what is the purpose of their hard work. The film was created by the Clean Seas Foundation and is dedicated to two expeditions in the Arctic, implemented with the participation of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Серей Валериевич Найденко, директор Института проблем экологии и эволюции им. А.Н. Северцова РАН рассказал подробнее о фильме «В фильме показаны особенности работы с самым крупным наземным млекопитающим планеты – «хозяином Арктики» белым медведем, показаны уникальные кадры, зафиксировавшие лаптевского моржа, одного из самых малоизученных морских млекопитающих планеты, демонстрируются уникальные съемки морских млекопитающих и птиц Арктики». Before the screening of the film, the guests had time to take a tour of the interactive exhibition “Arctic from the air”. It will be possible to enjoy beautiful views of the Arctic nature at the exhibition and even “visit” as a scientific observer of the air laboratory at the Darwin Museum until the end of January 2022. To do this, just buy a ticket to the museum. On January 20, 2022, an open screening of the documentary and a meeting with the expedition group will take place in the cinema hall.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of museum collections as a repository of hidden information about biodiversity. Over the past decade, “historical” DNA has been actively used for evolutionary and taxonomic studies. Genetic data from museum specimens is especially important for obtaining new information about rare or little-studied species. This group includes, for example, the Tien Shan birch mouse Sicista tianschanica, the last revision of which was carried out more than 30 years ago. A team of researchers, including an employee of the Laboratory of Microevolution of Mammals, IEE RAS, Ph.D. Zemmerov E.D., for the first time on the basis of samples from museum collections, including type specimens, carried out a comprehensive complex molecular genetic analysis of the nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial and nuclear genes of representatives of the Tien Shan birch mouse species. The data obtained as a result of this study were compared with the available information on previously identified karyomorphs of this group. It has been shown that this complex of species includes several clades of the species level. Based on genetic and karyotypic data, two new species have been described: Sicista terskeica and S. talgarica. Original publication:

The Ethiopian Highlands are a vast mountain range with many potential ecological niches, characterized by a high level of endemism among small mammals. Ethiopian endemics include 12 species of shrews of the genus Crocidura, represented exclusively by forest or alpine forms. This number of endemic species clearly demonstrates that the Ethiopian Highlands is an important center of species diversity and adaptive radiation for this genus. However, the currently available molecular genetic data on the relation of endemic Ethiopian species to each other, as well as with a similar endemic group from Tanzania, are limited by a small number of studied species, small sample sizes, and the lack of studies based on nuclear gene sequences. The staff of the Laboratory of Microevolution of Mammals of the A.N.Severtsov IEE RAS together with colleagues from the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University have carried out a phylogenetic analysis of an extended set of species of this genus and an assessment of the times of divergence between the main clades. The obtained phylogenetic patterns made it possible to propose an evolutionary scenario according to which the Ethiopian Highlands is the primary center of diversification for the Ethiopian-Tanzanian shrew clade. The territories south of the Ethiopian Highlands were probably settled by members of this group as a result of a single colonization event (1.3–0.7 Ma).