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Nursery pollination is an unusual plant–insect interaction in which an insect is both pollinator and seed predator. Depending on the abundance of the nursery pollinator and of other pollinators, this interaction can range from mutualism to parasitism and it is thus likely to vary geographically. We investigated this mechanism in the widespread species Silene latifolia in a Mediterranean environment that is likely to offer a rich pollinator community to the plant, thus decreasing the dependence on the nursery pollinator. Surprisingly, we found that although generalist pollinators contribute significantly to plant fitness, the nursery pollinator is still the more efficient.

Planktonic communities are shaped by ocean currents and participate in multiple global biogeochemical cycles. Unraveling how the functions of communities respond to strong environmental gradients will improve our understanding of the interactions between climate change and marine ecosystems. Here, we investigate changes in functions and gene expression of eukaryotic plankton transiting between the North Atlantic Ocean (NAO) in winter and the Arctic Ocean (AO) in spring/summer using metatranscriptomes and metagenomes from Tara Oceans. In Arctic communities, functions involved in maintaining the protein pool and translation machinery appear to be more active. Four major phylogenetically distant algal groups are abundant in both basins and show similar strategies at transcriptional level, including increased expression of some functions related to cold acclimation. These results shade lights on gene expression strategies shared by cosmopolitan phototrophs of widely separated lineages.