Recent studies have highlighted the ecological importance of cryptic habitat space on coral reefs. These microhabitats, ranging from framework cavities to intra-branch space within marine macroalgae, can harbour diverse and ecologically relevant taxa. Here we show that brittle stars, ubiquitous across such cryptic habitats (reported densities exceeding 100 ind. m −2 ), represent an important, but previously neglected, source o...

Freshwater eels of the Anguilla genus are experiencing global decline, largely driven by human activity. In Aotearoa‐New Zealand, tuna (both shortfin and longfin eels) are similarly affected, with habitat fragmentation and modification key drivers of their decline. We investigated the distribution and abundance of tuna across regional, catchment and reach‐level scales in an urban environment. We developed species distribution...

Global patterns of population genetic variation through time offer a window into evolutionary processes that maintain diversity. Over time, lineages may expand or contract their distribution, causing turnover in population genetic composition. At individual loci, migration, drift and selection (among other processes) may affect allele frequencies. Museum specimens of widely distributed species offer a unique window into the ge...

Life history ecology provides a framework for understanding the complex interactions between organisms and their environments but is challenging to resolve for long-lived and migratory species. In fishes, the combination of movement and foraging ecology is predominantly explored with stable isotope analysis (SIA) of accretionary tissues, such as otoliths. An alternative archival tissue validated for SIA in Actinopterygii (i.e....

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...

Long-term declines in coastal water quality and sedimentation can affect the restoration success of ecosystems such as seagrass and shellfish reefs. Resnagging coastal seascapes offers a potential alternative restoration method that is not reliant on abiotic conditions and which may enhance degraded landscapes for fish and fisheries. While common in freshwater ecosystems, such interventions are unusual for coastal seascapes de...

Estuaries are crucial feeding, nursery and resting sites for fish but can also be subject to the impacts of severe flooding. The environmental features of estuaries can mediate how they respond to these impacts. For example, the size, configuration, and context of estuarine habitats across seascapes affects the value of patches for fish, and so fish assemblages at sites with a greater habitat extent or closer to the mouth of a...

Understanding and managing the response of marine ecosystems to human pressures including climate change requires reliable large-scale and multi-decadal information on the state of key populations. These populations include the pelagic animals that support ecosystem services including carbon export and fisheries. The use of research vessels to collect information using scientific nets and acoustics is being replaced with techn...