Ghost pipefishes (Solenostomidae) have been regarded as specialist crustacean feeders since the 1960s, an inference resting on two primary dietary accounts. We report the first documented evidence of piscivory in the family based on micro‐computed tomography (micro‐CT) examination of voucher specimens of Solenostomus snuffleupagus and S. cyanopterus . Two head‐first teleost prey, both identified as gobiids, were recovered from...

Aims Grasslands are globally important for biodiversity and ecosystem services, including carbon storage, and have coevolved with disturbances such as fire. However, the effects of fire on soil carbon storage in southern African grasslands remain poorly understood. We investigated how fire frequency (annual, biennial, quinquennial, and infrequent) influences the distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) pools in a 40-year burn...

The United Kingdom is an important wintering ground for millions of waterbirds. Most U.K. wintering waterbird populations increased between 1970 and the mid‐1990s, but declined thereafter. We examined U.K. population indices in 46 wintering waterbird species in two 25‐year periods, 1970–1994 and 1995–2019, to identify which waterbird groups were vulnerable to declines. We modeled abundance to examine whether spatial patterns i...

A new species of ghost pipefish, Solenostomus snuffleupagus sp. nov., is described from the Coral Sea based on specimens (18–34 mm SL) collected from coral reef habitats in Queensland, Australia. The species is diagnosed by the following combination of characters: abundant elongate integumentary filaments imparting a conspicuously shaggy appearance; 36 total vertebrae (vs. 32–34 in all congeners); compact body form with a shor...

Accurate prediction of community assembly is a central goal in ecology but is challenging because assembly is governed by numerous mechanisms. Few theoretical models explicitly incorporate or test multiple mechanisms at once. We empirically tested the predictive performance of a plant community assembly model built using all possible combinations of four ‘mechanisms’ (soil resource competition, dispersal and colonisation, spat...

The determinants of population variability across taxa, time, and space are not fully understood, particularly for insects, a group with recent reports of widespread abundance declines. We collated data from unpublished and published sources to calculate indices of interannual population variability for over 4500 unique insect time series, comprising data from nearly 1500 species. We evaluate whether insects exhibit greater po...