Purpose Virtual reality (VR) reduces experimental and clinical pain, but whether these effects extend to naturally occurring muscle pain (NOMP) during exercise remains unclear. This study examined whether immersive nature-based VR attenuates NOMP and improves motor performance during prescribed and self-regulated exercise. Methods Two within-participant crossover studies were conducted involving 12 (Study 1) and 24 (Study 2) h...

This study investigates the practicality and potential impact of three-dimensional (3D) scanning technology to assess marine mammal strandings. Mobile phones were used to evaluate the technology and its capability to accurately reconstruct topographic features of 11 distinct marine mammal species, across diverse environmental conditions. This process was validated by initially measuring an inflatable whale to an accuracy of gr...

Endangered Southern Resident killer whales ( Orcinus orca ) are fish‐eaters that preferentially prey on adult Chinook salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ). Despite being salmon specialists, individuals from all three killer whale pods (J, K, L) have been observed harassing and killing porpoises (family Phocoenidae) without consuming them. Retrospectively, we identified and analyzed 78 episodes of Southern Resident killer whales...

Many quantitative genetic models assume that all genetic variation is additive because of a lack of data with sufficient structure and quality to determine the relative contribution of additive and non-additive variation. Here the fractions of additive ( f a ) and non-additive ( f d ) genetic variation were estimated in Sitka spruce for height, bud burst and pilodyn penetration depth. Approximately 1500 offspring were produced...

During the past century, bivalve populations across the globe have collapsed, resulting in negative ecosystem consequences due to their outsized impact on shallow estuaries. In response, there has been strong interest in the restoration of marine bivalve populations. Here, we present a decade-long restoration effort that sought to rebuild a collapsed (99.5% reduction in harvest) and recruitment-limited population of hard clams...

Cell‐based seafood is an emerging novel food, with many start‐up companies aspiring for ocean conservation benefits through expanded market share that displaces wild‐caught seafood. However, the ability for cell‐based seafood to achieve this conservation outcome is often oversimplified and will rely on an extensive, and we find somewhat tenuous, chain of events. Here, we outline the technological, behavioural, market and ecolo...

The importance of place in landscape management and outdoor recreation has been prominent in the literature since the 1970s. As such, calls to incorporate place into the management of parks, forests, and other protected areas exist. However, little work explores how place attachment may complement existing management frameworks. Hence, the purpose of this investigation was to explore levels of visitors’ place attachment intens...

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...

Summary Dissolved organic matter ( DOM ) and heterotrophic bacteria are highly diverse components of the ocean system, and their interactions are key in regulating the biogeochemical cycles of major elements. How chemical and phylogenetic diversity are linked remains largely unexplored to date. To investigate interactions between bacterial diversity and DOM , we followed the response of natural bacterial communities to two sou...

Organic material is degraded anaerobically by a complex community of microbes making up the anaerobic food chain. This community was examined in methane‐rich sediments of the Beaufort Sea, Alaska, using metagenomic sequencing, along with tag pyrosequencing and quantitative polymerase chain reaction analyses of 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid genes. The goal of the study was to examine the relative abundance and taxonomic compos...