Mass windborne migrations extend the range of the migratory locust in East China

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordMigratory insect pests pose a substantial challenge to global food security. These issues are particularly acute when pest incursions occur considerably beyond the expected range, through natural migration or human-aided transport, because the lack of species-specific control strategies and a potential absence of species-specific natural enemies in the newly-invaded area may lead to rapid establishment of a new pest. One such threat is posed by the Oriental migratory locust Locusta migratoria manilensis in China, which, historically, has been restricted to eastern China from the Bohai Gulf southwards, and now threatens to expand its range into the agriculturally important region of northeast China. We analyzed data from a recent outbreak of migratory locusts in Heilongjiang Province (extreme northeast China), > 700 km north of its current known range, and identified the source region, timing of arrival and probable migratory routes of this incursion. We further show that warming temperatures in this region will likely allow subsequent invasions to establish permanent populations in northeast China, and thus authorities in this important crop-producing region of East Asia should be vigilant to the threat posed by this species.China Agriculture Research SystemChinese Academy of SciencesNational Natural Science Foundation of ChinaNatural Science Foundation of Jiangsu ProvinceScience and Technology Facilities Council (STFC

The Tree of Life

International audienceThe tree of life, representing the evolution and the relationships between all life-forms, has challenged scientists as soon as Darwin’s work became accepted. A fuel for imagination for a long time, it became more concrete after the molecular biology revolution and the application of mathematical tools to quantify sequence evolution. Despite tremendous advances fueled by the continuous progress in DNA sequencing, from PCR to metagenomics, and in algorithms for phylogenetic reconstruction, many fundamental questions remain still open in the tree of life topology. The biggest of them all would currently be the relationship between Archaea and Eukarya: while some authors argue that they are sister groups (the Woese tree), others state that the latter emerged from the former (the eocyte tree). The tree of life and its subsequent questions are definitely complex objects to comprehend. Evolution states that in order to fully understand life, one has to first know its history, and this mantra should apply here as well. We thus decided to focus in this chapter on the recent history of the tree of life, from its entry into phylogenetics in the 1970s to the recent identification of Asgard archaea and the controversies they have brought. We also briefly discuss the position of the viruses in the tree of life and how their analysis is helpful to understand their host evolution