Herbivores are commonly classified as host specialists or generalists for various purposes, yet the definitions of these terms, and their intermediates, are often imprecise and ambiguous. We quantified host breadth for 240 non‐native, tree‐feeding insects in North America using phylogenetic diversity. We demonstrated that a partitioning of host breadth: (1) causes 67% of non‐native insects to shift from a generalist to special...

Aggregations of individual animals that form for breeding purposes are a critical ecological process for many species, yet these aggregations are inherently vulnerable to exploitation. Studies of the decline of exploited populations that form breeding aggregations tend to focus on catch rate and thus often overlook reductions in geographic range. We tested the hypothesis that catch rate and site occupancy of exploited fish‐spa...

Global warming is expected to reduce body sizes of ectothermic animals. Although the underlying mechanisms of size reductions remain poorly understood, effects appear stronger at latitudinal extremes (poles and tropics) and in aquatic rather than terrestrial systems. To shed light on this phenomenon, we examined the size dependence of critical thermal maxima ( CT max) and aerobic metabolism in a commercially important tropical...

Multimodel frameworks are common in contemporary elasmobranch growth literature. These techniques offer a proposed improvement over individual growth functions by incorporating additional candidate models with alternative characteristics. Sigmoid functions (e.g. Gompertz and logistic) are a popular alternative to the commonly used von Bertalanffy growth function ( VBGF ) as they are hypothesized to better suit certain taxa bas...

Many taxa are undergoing distribution shifts in response to anthropogenic climate change. However, detecting a climate signal in mobile species is difficult due to their wide‐ranging, patchy distributions, often driven by natural climate variability. For example, difficulties associated with assessing pelagic fish distributions have rendered fisheries management ill‐equipped to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change,...

Aim To compare different quantitative approaches for estimating rates of spread in the exotic species gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar L., using county‐level presence/absence data and spatially extensive trapping grids. Location USA Methods We used county‐level presence/absence records of the gypsy moth's distribution in the USA, which are available beginning in 1900, and extensive grids of pheromone‐baited traps, which are availa...

Allee effects can play a critical role in slowing or preventing the establishment of low density founder populations of non‐indigenous species. Similarly, the spread of established invaders into new habitats can be influenced by the degree to which small founder populations ahead of the invasion front are suppressed through Allee effects. We develop an approach to use empirical data on the gypsy moth, a non‐indigenous invader...