Freshwaters face increasing pressures from chemical, hydrological and climatic changes, yet tools for assessing their condition remain limited. River biofilms, composed of diverse microbial communities, integrate environmental signals over space and time, making them sensitive indicators of river health. Using 16S rRNA gene sequencing of more than 1600 biofilms collected across a national river network, we quantified bacterial...

Studies of cetacean diving behavior in multiple locations in different ocean basins allow for an assessment of variability within and among populations. We examine foraging dive behaviors of goose‐beaked whales ( Ziphius cavirostris ) and dense‐beaked whales ( Mesoplodon densirostris ) using data from 132 tagged whales in seven locations in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. Acoustic recording tags are...

Excessive phytoplankton concentrations in rivers can result in the loss of plant and invertebrate communities, and threaten drinking water supplies. Whilst the physicochemical controls on algal blooms have been identified previously, how these factors combine to control the initiation, size, and cessation of blooms in rivers is not well understood. We applied flow cytometry to quantify diatom, chlorophyte, and cyanobacterial g...

The krill surplus hypothesis of unlimited prey resources available for Antarctic predators due to commercial whaling in the 20th century has remained largely untested since the 1970s. Rapid warming of the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) over the past 50 years has resulted in decreased seasonal ice cover and a reduction of krill. The latter is being exacerbated by a commercial krill fishery in the region. Despite this, humpba...

Fishes stocked for recreation and angling can damage freshwater habitats and negatively impact biodiversity. The pond‐associated crucian carp ( Carassius carassius ) is rare across Europe and is stocked for conservation management in England, but its impacts on pond biota are understudied. Freshwater invertebrates contribute substantially to aquatic biodiversity, encompassing many rare and endemic species, but their small size...

Studies of the social behavior of Cuvier's beaked whales ( Ziphius cavirostris ) are challenging because of their deep‐water habitat usually far from shore and the limited time they spend at the surface. The sociality of these deepest diving mammals is of interest, however, especially for our understanding of how social systems evolve in extreme habitats. High levels of scarring suggest that males compete agonistically for acc...

Summary The heterogeneous nature of lotic habitats plays an important role in the complex ecological and evolutionary processes that structure the microbial communities within them. Due to such complexity, our understanding of lotic microbial ecology still lacks conceptual frameworks for the ecological processes that shape these communities. We explored how bacterial community composition and underlying ecological assembly pro...

In contrast to the situation in plants inhabiting most of the world’s ecosystems, mycorrhizal fungi are usually absent from roots of the only two native vascular plant species of maritime Antarctica, Deschampsia antarctica and Colobanthus quitensis . Instead, a range of ascomycete fungi, termed dark septate endophytes (DSEs), frequently colonise the roots of these plant species. We demonstrate that colonisation of Antarctic va...

Compassionate conservation focuses on 4 tenets: first, do no harm; individuals matter; inclusivity of individual animals; and peaceful coexistence between humans and animals. Recently, compassionate conservation has been promoted as an alternative to conventional conservation philosophy. We believe examples presented by compassionate conservationists are deliberately or arbitrarily chosen to focus on mammals; inherently not co...

Organisms continuously release DNA into their environments via shed cells, excreta, gametes and decaying material. Analysis of this ‘environmental DNA ’ ( eDNA ) is revolutionizing biodiversity monitoring. eDNA outperforms many established survey methods for targeted detection of single species, but few studies have investigated how well eDNA reflects whole communities of organisms in natural environments. We investigated whet...