The postdoctoral community is an essential component of the academic and scientific workforce, but a lack of data about this community has made it difficult to develop policies to address concerns about salaries, working conditions, diversity and career development, and to evaluate the impact of existing policies. Here we present comprehensive survey results from 7,603 postdocs based at 351 US academic and non-academic (e.g. hospital, industry and government lab) institutions in 2016. In addition to demographic and salary information, we present multivariate analyses on factors influencing postdoc career plans and satisfaction with mentorship. We further analyze gender dynamics and expose wage disparities. Academic research positions remain the predominant career choice, although women and US citizens are less likely than their male and non-US citizen counterparts to choose academic research positions. Receiving mentorship training has a significant positive effect on postdoc satisfaction with mentorship. Quality of and satisfaction with postdoc mentorship also appear to heavily influence career choice.

Agricultural dependency on insect-mediated pollination is increasing at the same time that pollinator populations are experiencing declines in diversity and abundance. Current pollinator research in agriculture focuses largely on diurnal pollinators, yet the evidence for pollination by moths and other nocturnal pollinators is growing. Apples are one of the most valuable and important fruits produced globally, and apple production is dependent on insect-mediated cross-pollination to generate a profitable crop. We examined contributions to apple production provided by nocturnal insects via an exclusion experiment. We compared the relative contributions to apple production provided by nocturnal and diurnal pollinators using fruit set, the likelihood of cluster pollination, and seed set. We found nocturnal pollinators capable of facilitating the production of as many apples at similar levels of pollination as diurnal pollinators. We further found evidence that nocturnal and diurnal pollinators pollinate synergistically, with pollination contributions being additive in one year of our study. Our research identifies significant contributions to apple production provided by nocturnal pollinators, which may interact with diurnal pollinators in ways that are currently unrecognized. Expansions of this research into additional pollinator-dependent crops and focused investigations on specific nocturnal insects will provide more accurate assessments of nocturnal-pollinator roles in agriculture and improve our overall understanding of pollination in agriculture.

Background: Animal behavior is largely driven by the information that animals are able to extract and process from their environment. However, the function and organization of sensory systems often change throughout ontogeny, particularly in animals that undergo indirect development. As an initial step toward investigating these ontogenetic changes at the molecular level, we characterized the sensory gene repertoire and examined the expression profiles of genes linked to vision and chemosensation in two life stages of an insect that goes through metamorphosis, the butterfly Bicyclus anynana. Results: Using RNA-seq, we compared gene expression in the heads of late fifth instar larvae and newly eclosed adults that were reared under identical conditions. Over 50 % of all expressed genes were differentially expressed between the two developmental stages, with 4,036 genes upregulated in larval heads and 4,348 genes upregulated in adult heads. In larvae, upregulated vision-related genes were biased toward those involved with eye development, while phototransduction genes dominated the vision genes that were upregulated in adults. Moreover, the majority of the chemosensory genes we identified in the B. anynana genome were differentially expressed between larvae and adults, several of which share homology with genes linked to pheromone detection, host plant recognition, and foraging in other species of Lepidoptera. Conclusions: These results revealed promising candidates for furthering our understanding of sensory processing and behavior in the disparate developmental stages of butterflies and other animals that undergo metamorphosis.

The spectrum of light that an animal sees—from ultraviolet to far red light—is governed by the number and wavelength sensitivity of a family of retinal proteins called opsins. It has been hypothesized that the spectrum of light available in an environment influences the range of colours that a species has evolved to see. However, invertebrates and vertebrates use phylogenetically distinct opsins in their retinae, and it remains unclear whether these distinct opsins influence what animals see, or how they adapt to their light environments. Systematically using published visual sensitivity data from across animal phyla, we found that terrestrial animals are more sensitive to shorter and longer wavelengths of light than aquatic animals and that invertebrates are more sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light than vertebrates. Using phylogenetically controlled analyses, we found that closed and open canopy habitat species have different spectral sensitivities when comparing across the Metazoa and excluding habitat generalists, while deepwater animals are no more sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light than shallow-water animals. Our results suggest that animals do adapt to their light environment; however, the invertebrate–vertebrate evolutionary divergence may limit the degree to which animals can perform visual tuning.