Concerns about the prospect of a global pandemic have been triggered many times during the last two decades. These have been realised through the current COVID‐19 pandemic, due to a new coronavirus SARS‐CoV2, which has impacted almost every country on Earth. Here, we show how considering the pandemic through the lenses of the evolutionary ecology of pathogens can help better understand the root causes

Ellner et al. (2020) state that identifying the mechanisms producing positive invasion growth rates (IGR) is useful in characterising species persistence. We agree about the importance of the sign of IGR as a binary indicator of persistence, but question whether its magnitude provides much information once the sign is given.

Pande et al. (2020) point out that persistence time can decrease even as invader growth rates (IGRs) increase, which potentially undermines modern coexistence theory. However, because persistence time increases rapidly with system size only when IGR > 0, to understand how any real community persists, we should first identify the mechanisms producing positive IGR.

Under noiseless experimental conditions, sugar concentration of secreted floral nectar may increase after flower exposure to nearby sounds of pollinator flight (Veits et al. 2019). However, we reject the argument that this represents adaptive plant behaviour, and consider that the appealing analogy between a flower and human ear is unjustified.

In ‘Trait plasticity alters the range of possible coexistence conditions in a competition–colonisation trade‐off’ Muthukrishnan et al. (2020) which was published in Volume 23, issue 5 (May 2020), the authors would like to correct a coding error, discovered after publication in the analyses. Evaluation of mutual invasibility for specific conditions and landscapes in Simulations 1 and 2 of the manuscript

In ‘Eco‐energetic consequences of evolutionary shifts in body size’ by Malerba, White and Marshall which was published in Volume 21, issue 1 (January 2018), the authors wish to report a mistake in the geometric formula used to calculate the cell biovolume, due to confusing the semi‐axes of the fitted ellipse with the axes. Specifically, the correct formula to calculate the volume of a cell with prolate

In ‘Individual differences in behaviour explain variation in survival: a meta‐analysis’ by Moiron et al . which was published in volume 23, issue 2 (February 2020), there was a minor error in Table 1. The subspecies name of the study of Santicchia et al. (2018) was not Sciurus vulgaris orientis , but instead, the correct name was Sciurus vulgaris fuscoater . To increase the nomenclature coherence,

In Veits et al., we showed that flowers respond to a range of pollinator sounds by increased nectar sugar concentration. Here we clarify that (1) our argument is relevant to most pollinators, and not limited to bees (2) specifically, bees do access Oenothera Drumondii nectar in this area.