Low-inflow estuaries are highly variable and productive habitats. Organisms in these systems must cope with constantly changing conditions. This study investigates the continuous response of oysters to environmental stimuli in a small, low-inflow, estuary, Los Peñasquitos Lagoon (LPL), in San Diego, California, USA. The oysters were placed on a mooring at near-surface and near-bottom locations and instrumented with noninvasive...

Vegetation surveys provide key information for evaluating functions within and across estuaries. However, survey methods and analyses are often highly variable, site-specific, and driven by monitoring program goals and objectives, making regional comparisons that include multiple programs difficult. This study compared multiple transect- and quadrat-based vegetation monitoring methods within eight southern California estuaries...

Human–carnivore coexistence is essential for biodiversity conservation, yet measuring the attitudes and behaviors that support it remains methodologically challenging. We developed psychometric scales to assess willingness to coexist with carnivores and the underlying beliefs of this coexistence through an iterative expert elicitation process grounded in risk perception theory and moral psychology to ensure strong content vali...

Gape size is a key functional trait that influences feeding performance and ecological fitness across animal taxa; yet, its role within species remains underexplored, particularly in dynamic environments. We investigated the relationship between relative gape size and condition factor ( Kn ) across 15 species of tropical freshwater fish from northern Australia, spanning four trophic groups: predators, micro-carnivores, omnivor...

Migratory fish species are highly vulnerable to stream fragmentation. Potamodromous golden perch ( Macquaria ambigua ) inhabit the barrier-laden Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), Australia’s largest river system, and its lifecycle includes a requirement for uninterrupted stretches of flowing water habitat. Owing to these barriers, large-scale connectivity in many regions is limited to periods of high flow events that facilitate barr...

Extreme climate events provide an opportunity to understand how habitats will respond to future long-term climate change. Starting in late 2013, an exceptionally strong marine heatwave, or the “Blob”, which was followed by El Niño in 2015–2016, resulted in an anomalous temporary rise in sea level on the Pacific US coast. We examined the response of tidal marsh plant communities in three California estuaries spanning over 600 k...

Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group‐level processes such as subgroup formation and fission–fusion dynamics. Although critical to animal sociality, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing coh...

Following the introduction of the ‘Boolarra’ strain to Australia in the mid 1960’s, Common carp ( Cyprinus carpio ) rapidly spread in waterways across the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) in southern-eastern Australia. A previous study of the population expansion based upon data up to the early 2000s suggested the carp population may have reached, and was fluctuating around, the ecosystem carrying capacity. It has been widely stated...

The southern California coastline hosts low-inflow estuaries that have mouths that periodically close. Low-inflow estuaries can become hypoxic and are then often opened mechanically. The consequences of mouth closure and hypoxia (< 2 mg L −1 O 2 ) on macrobenthic densities, species richness, diversity, composition, and biological traits were evaluated for legacy data generated by the Pacific Estuarine Research Lab for Los Peña...

The impacts of mine contaminants on ecological connectivity in rivers and streams are poorly documented globally. We used acoustic telemetry to evaluate and refine conceptual models of fish movement in Magela Creek, a stream in the wet-dry tropics of Australia. This creek receives wastewater discharge from a nearby uranium mine, and a secondary objective was to describe behavioural responses of fish to one such discharge event...

Small low-inflow intermittently closed estuaries are common in Mediterranean climates worldwide; however, despite their important contributions to ecosystem services and coastal resilience, their dynamics have been less well studied relative to classical (i.e., deeper, persistent freshwater inflow) estuaries. It is known that infragravity wave propagation into these estuaries can induce strong currents and that closures lead t...