In the United States, shark meat is sold in grocery stores, seafood markets, and online. The meat is often mislabeled as another species or generically labeled as “shark”. The ambiguity of these generic labels makes it challenging to assess the conservation implications of this practice and for consumers to avoid high trophic-level species that often have high mercury concentrations in their tissues. We purchased and DNA barco...

Environmentally transmitted parasites produce transmission stages that can remain viable and infective for extended periods of time in the environment where susceptible hosts may encounter them. Although many parasites have this mode of transmission, the abundance and distribution of environmental transmission stages have largely been overlooked, especially in aquatic habitats. Without empirical data to characterize spatial an...

Outbreaks of environmentally transmitted parasites require that susceptible hosts encounter transmission stages in the environment and become infected, but we also know that transmission stages can be in the environment without triggering disease outbreaks. One challenge in understanding the relationship between environmental transmission stages and disease outbreaks is that the distribution and abundance of transmission stage...

To predict the effects of terrestrial habitat change on amphibian populations, we need to know how amphibians respond to habitat heterogeneity, and whether habitat choice remains consistent throughout the life‐history cycle. We conducted four experiments to evaluate how the spatial distribution of juvenile wood frogs, Rana sylvatica (including both overall abundance and localized density), was influenced by habitat choice and...

Summary Escherichia coli is an important member of the gastrointestinal tract of humans and warm‐blooded animals (primary habitat). In the external environment outside the host (secondary habitat), it is often considered to be only a transient member of the microbiota found in water and soil, although recent evidence suggests that some strains can persist in temperate soils and freshwater beaches. Here we quantified the popula...