Aim Insects provide essential ecosystem services, but there is a concern that insect abundance is in rapid decline. Identifying trends in insect biodiversity is challenging because we lack baseline data for most biogeographic regions, and most insect species remain undescribed. Here, we aim to report the first nationwide inventory of insect biodiversity in South Africa. Location Eleven National Botanical Gardens representing f...

The fast‐slow continuum is a key axis of variation in life history strategies capturing the evolutionary trade‐off between allocation in lifespan versus reproduction. It has been suggested that social behaviour, and therefore network structure, may vary across this continuum, but formal theory remains scarce. We develop a mathematical model to examine how the rate of demographic replacement may influence emergent social networ...

Understanding biodiversity in offshore benthic ecosystems is crucial as anthropogenic pressures like offshore wind development increasingly alter marine environments. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), widely used for marine mammal research, offers a promising yet underexplored tool for assessing broader faunal communities. Here, we investigate whether PAM data, collected initially for marine mammal monitoring, can reveal spat...

Prey availability and predation risk drive animal distribution, movement, and foraging ecology, yet studies rarely analyse multiple predator–prey levels together. Understanding how predators optimise risk–reward tradeoffs is important for species conservation and management, especially in systems facing extreme ecosystem change. We examined how top‐down (modelled polar bear habitat selection) and bottom‐up (modelled fish diver...

Deoxygenation events threaten coral reefs as they can result in biodiversity loss and are expected to occur more frequently with increasing sea temperatures and eutrophication. Multiple deoxygenation events have occurred at Bill’s Bay, a semi-enclosed lagoon within the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Marine Park, and have been associated with significant ecosystem impacts, including fish kills and coral mortality. Althou...