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Drivers and Consequences of Size Declines in UnicellsNARA Subscribed
The communities of unicellular microbes (bacteria, protists and yeasts) that underpin ecosystems are changing. In warmer conditions, protists tend to shrink, but the consequences of these changes in size are unclear. We show preliminary evidence that warming‐mediated declines in cell size observed in protists also apply to bacteria and yeasts. Predicting the consequences of these warming‐mediated size declines requires that th...
The northern Upper Rhine Graben (Germany) contains a complex, quasi‐continuous Quaternary record, but constraining its chronology is challenging. This study presents the first application of amino acid geochronology for this region using Bithynia opercula to establish a relative dating framework. Intra‐crystalline protein decomposition (IcPD) results from opercula have allowed their horizons to be statistically grouped into cl...
Aim Reproductive output features prominently in many trait databases, but the metrics describing it vary and are often untethered to temporal and volumetric dimensions (e.g., fecundity per bout). The use of such ambiguous reproductive measures to make broad‐scale comparisons across taxonomic groups will be meaningful only if they show a 1:1 relationship with a reproductive measure that explicitly includes both a volumetric and...
How does fecundity scale with female size? Female size not only affects the number and size of offspring released in any one reproductive bout (i.e. batch fecundity) but also affects frequency of bouts that occur within a given spawning season (i.e. spawning frequency). Previous studies have noted contrasting effects of female size on spawning frequency such that the effect of female size on reproductive output and total egg p...
Neanderthals on the Lower Danube: Middle Palaeolithic evidence in the Danube Gorges of the BalkansNARA Subscribed
The article presents evidence about the Middle Palaeolithic and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition interval in the karst area of the Danube Gorges in the Lower Danube Basin. We review the extant data and present new evidence from two recently investigated sites found on the Serbian side of the Danube River – Tabula Traiana and Dubočka‐Kozja caves. The two sites have yielded layers dating to both the Middle and Upper Palae...
Predicting the response of disease vectors to global change: The importance of allometric scalingNARA Subscribed
The distribution of disease vectors such as mosquitoes is changing. Climate change, invasions and vector control strategies all alter the distribution and abundance of mosquitoes. When disease vectors undergo a range shift, so do disease burdens. Predicting such shifts is a priority to adequately prepare for disease control. Accurate predictions of distributional changes depend on how factors such as temperature and competitio...
Testing MacArthur's minimisation principle: do communities minimise energy wastage during succession?NARA Subscribed
Robert MacArthur developed a theory of community assembly based on competition. By incorporating energy flow, MacArthur's theory allows for predictions of community function. A key prediction is that communities minimise energy wastage over time, but this minimisation is a trade‐off between two conflicting processes: exploiting food resources, and maintaining low metabolism and mortality. Despite its simplicity and elegance, M...
Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community‐led open‐source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal...
Size imposes physiological and ecological constraints upon all organisms. Theory abounds on how energy flux covaries with body size, yet causal links are often elusive. As a more direct way to assess the role of size, we used artificial selection to evolve the phytoplankton species Dunaliella tertiolecta towards smaller and larger body sizes. Within 100 generations ( c . 1 year), we generated a fourfold difference in cell volu...
Changes in population density alter the availability, acquisition, and expenditure of resources by individuals, and consequently their contribution to the flux of energy in a system. While both negative and positive density‐dependence have been well studied in natural populations, we are yet to estimate the underlying energy flows that generate these patterns and the ambivalent effects of density make prediction difficult. Ult...
Many studies examine how body size mediates energy use, but few investigate how size simultaneously regulates energy acquisition. Furthermore, rarely energy fluxes are examined while accounting for the role of biotic and abiotic factors in which they are nested. These limitations contribute to an incomplete understanding of how size affects the transfer of energy through individuals, populations, and communities. Here we chara...
Do low oxygen environments facilitate marine invasions? Relative tolerance of native and invasive species to low oxygen conditionsNARA Subscribed
Biological invasions are one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity. Marine artificial structures are proliferating worldwide and provide a haven for marine invasive species. Such structures disrupt local hydrodynamics, which can lead to the formation of oxygen‐depleted microsites. The extent to which native fauna can cope with such low oxygen conditions, and whether invasive species, long associated with artificial str...
Temperature effects on mass‐scaling exponents in colonial animals: a manipulative testNARA Subscribed
Body size and temperature are fundamental drivers of ecological processes because they determine metabolic rates at the individual level. Whether these drivers act independently on individual‐level metabolic rates remains uncertain. Most studies of intraspecific scaling of unitary organisms must rely on preexisting differences in size to examine its relationship with metabolic rate, thereby potentially confounding size‐correla...
Competition in benthic marine invertebrates: the unrecognized role of exploitative competition for oxygenNARA Subscribed
Competition is a ubiquitous structuring force across systems, but different fields emphasize the role of different types of competition. In benthic marine environments, where some of the classic examples of competition were described, there is a strong emphasis on interference competition: marine invertebrates are assumed to compete fiercely for the limiting resource of space. Much of our understanding of the dynamics of this...