Two simultaneous human cases of fatal melioidosis in temperate south‐eastern Queensland involved patients who had had pre‐existing multisystem illnesses, had sustained cutaneous lesions before illness onset, and died from overwhelming sepsis. Onset of disease was preceded by unseasonably heavy rainfall. These and other features of these cases suggest that the source of infection was local, in which case the endemicity of Burkholderia pseudomallei in temperate regional Australia may be broader than is currently recognised, and melioidosis may need to be considered in at‐risk patients in these areas, as well as in tropical and subtropical areas, who present with severe pneumonia and septicaemia.

Understanding the factors that allow a species to expand its range and adapt to changing habitats is essential for mitigating anthropogenic change. We evaluated how behavior and cognition facilitate colonization of new environments and evolve post establishment during natural biological invasions. Marine threespined sticklebacks are expert colonists with a penchant for invading freshwater environments and rapidly adapting to them. However, the role of behavior in facilitating rapid adaptation in this system has received little attention. By rearing replicate populations of sticklebacks under common garden conditions in the lab, we tested the hypothesis that boldness is favored in dispersers and that neophilia and flexibility are favored in recently-arrived immigrants. We found that dispersing populations comprised bold individuals, while sticklebacks from the invaded region were flexible in their behavior. Moreover, boldness and flexibility were negatively correlated with each another at the individual, family and population levels. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that there is a heritable component to boldness and flexibility, therefore their divergence is likely to be evolutionary in origin. If boldness is favored in invaders during the initial dispersal stage, while flexibility is favored in recent immigrants during the establishment stage, then the link between boldness and flexibility could generate positive correlations between successes during both the dispersal and establishment stages, and therefore play a key role in facilitating colonization success in this important model organism.

Diaporthe celastrina, ein Pilz, dessen Aktivität gegenüber Steroiden bislang noch nicht bekannt war, hydroxyliert eine Reihe von dioxygenierten 5α‐Androstanen (Tabelle) im allgemeinen in α‐Stellung.

Experiences of parents and/or offspring are often assumed to affect the development of trait values in offspring because they provide information about the external environment, but it is currently unclear how information from different sources and times might combine to affect the information-states that provide the foundation for the patterns observed in empirical studies of developmental plasticity in response to environmental cues. We analyze Bayesian models designed to mimic fully-factorial experimental studies of within and transgenerational plasticity (TWP), in which parents, offspring, neither or both are exposed to cues from predators, to determine how different durations of cue exposure for parents and offspring, the devaluation of information from parents or the degradation of information from parents would affect offspring estimates of environmental states related to risk of predation at the end of such experiments. We show that the effects of different cue durations, the devaluation of information from parents, and the degradation of information from parents on offspring estimates are all expected to vary as a function of interactions with two other key parameters of information-based models of TWP: parental priors and the relative cue reliability in the different treatments. Our results suggest empiricists should expect to observe considerable variation across experimental studies of TWP based on simple principles of information-updating, without needing to invoke additional assumptions about costs, tradeoffs, development constraints, the fitness consequences of different trait values, or other factors.