A recent UN report describes many regions as facing ‘water bankruptcy, ’ a condition in which available water resources can no longer meet existing demands. In practice, this means irrigation will likely bear the greatest burden of future water‐use reductions, a complicated and fraught decision to make given its critical role in food security. This review paper highlights the growing range of information now available through...

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...

Colour aberrations are widely reported in vertebrates, but seldom for elasmobranchs. Shark trophic level varies ontogenetically and according to species, so atypical colouration may have implications for ecological fitness both as predator and prey. Here, we present, to our knowledge, the first and only record of a piebald leucistic smallspotted catshark Scyliorhinus canicula from Welsh waters, specifically in the Cardigan Bay...

Calcium carbonate production constitutes one of the core processes that drive coral reef ecosystem functioning and can be assessed using in-water or image-based survey methods, which have not previously been compared. This study compares carbonate production estimates from in-water ReefBudget surveys and image-based CoralNet analyses in Puerto Rico, Indonesia, and Chagos Archipelago. Methods were compared for different regions...

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...

Background Temperament is an important production trait in cattle and multiple strategies had been developed to generate molecular markers to assist animal selection. As nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms are markers with the potential to affect gene functions, they could be useful to predict phenotypic effects. Genetic selection of less stress-responsive, temperamental animals is desirable from an economic and welf...

Recurrent climate-driven warming events, which can induce severe coral bleaching and mortality on tropical reefs, are predicted to cause homogenisation of coral communities and loss of ecosystem functions in shallow reef systems (< 30 m). However, data documenting the variation in coral carbonate production across depth are limited. Here we explore differences in coral cover, community composition, coral colony size structure...