Given the costs associated with designing novel active ingredients, new formulations focus on the use of other ingredients to modify existing formulations. Nanosized encapsulated pesticides offer a variety of enhanced features including controlled release and improved efficacy. Despite the presence of nanosized capsules in current-use pesticide formulations, the analytical and toxicological implications of encapsulation are uncertain. To explore this issue quantitatively, we fractionated the capsules of a commercially available encapsulated insecticide formulation (γ-cyhalothrin active ingredient) into two size ranges: a large fraction (LF), with an average hydrodynamic diameter (HDD) of 758 nm, and a small fraction (SF), with an average HDD of 449 nm. We developed a novel extraction method demonstrating a time-dependent inhibition of γ-cyhalothrin from capsules for up to 48 h. An acute immobilization test with a freshwater macroinvertebrate (Ceriodaphnia dubia) revealed that the SF was significantly more toxic than both the LF and the free γ-cyhalothrin treatment (EC50 = 0.18 µg/L, 0.57 µg/L, and 0.65 µg/L, respectively). These findings highlight that encapsulation of γ-cyhalothrin mitigates hydrophobic partitioning in a time-dependent manner and influences toxicity in a size-dependent manner. Recognizing the analytical and toxicological nuances of various nanosized capsules can contribute to innovation in pesticide formulations and may lead to more comprehensive pesticide regulation.

Understanding ecological mechanisms regulating the evolution of biodiversity is of much interest to ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Adaptive radiation constitutes an important evolutionary process that generates biodiversity. Competition has long been thought to influence adaptive radiation, but the directionality of its effect and associated mechanisms remain ambiguous. Here, we report a rigorous experimental test of the role of competition on adaptive radiation using the rapidly evolving bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25 interacting with multiple bacterial species that differed in their phylogenetic distance to the diversifying bacterium. We showed that the inhibitive effect of competitors on the adaptive radiation of P. fluorescens decreased as their phylogenetic distance increased. To explain this phylogenetic dependency of adaptive radiation, we linked the phylogenetic distance between P. fluorescens and its competitors to their niche and competitive fitness differences. Competitive fitness differences, which showed weak phylogenetic signal, reduced P. fluorescens abundance and thus diversification, whereas phylogenetically conserved niche differences promoted diversification. These results demonstrate the context dependency of competitive effects on adaptive radiation, and highlight the importance of past evolutionary history for ongoing evolutionary processes.