Deep rock salt formations can be drilled and solution-mined into caverns for permanent waste disposal, or temporary energy storage (natural gas/compressed air/hydrogen) to alleviate the intermittency of wind/solar energy. We report here the results of the laboratory appraisal of the key properties of a thick Devonian rock salt formation in the Canning Basin (Western Australia). Two representative but contrasting lithofacies we...

Aim Animal movements are a fundamental process affecting communities and ecosystems. Quantifying habitat selection across species and habitats is key for understanding how animals respond to environmental change. Currently, we lack comparative studies that examine how habitat selection varies across species traits and landscapes. We aim to quantify global patterns of habitat selection to help understand the fundamental drivers...

In the face of an increasing world population and a subsequent need for an increase in sustainable and healthy food production, low trophic species, such as oysters, emerge as a promising alternative. However, regional variations in oyster production techniques, market dynamics, and consumption patterns create challenges for both the global and local industry’s growth. In this study, a descriptive qualitative analysis of oyste...

Background Cardiomyocyte hypertrophy is a hallmark of cardiac dysfunction in patients with aortic stenosis (AS), and can be triggered by left ventricular (LV) pressure overload in mice by aortic banding (AB). Syndecan-4 is a transmembrane heparan sulphate proteoglycan which is found increased in the myocardium of AS patients and AB mice. The role of syndecan-4 in cardiomyocyte hypertrophy is not well understood. Purpose of the...

Aim Macroecological studies that require habitat suitability data for many species often derive this information from expert opinion. However, expert‐based information is inherently subjective and thus prone to errors. The increasing availability of GPS tracking data offers opportunities to evaluate and supplement expert‐based information with detailed empirical evidence. Here, we compared expert‐based habitat suitability info...

The forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) states that energy intake for ungulates is maximised when forage biomass is at intermediate levels. Nevertheless, metabolic allometry and different digestive systems suggest that resource selection should vary across ungulate species. By combining GPS relocations with remotely sensed data on forage characteristics and surface water, we quantified the effect of body size and digestive syst...

The genomic variation of an invasive species may be affected by complex demographic histories and evolutionary changes during the invasion. Here, we describe the relative influence of bottlenecks, clonality, and population expansion in determining genomic variability of the widespread red macroalga Agarophyton vermiculophyllum . Its introduction from mainland Japan to the estuaries of North America and Europe coincided with sh...

Aim If we are able to determine the geographic origin of an invasion, as well as its known area of introduction, we can better appreciate the innate environmental tolerance of a species and the strength of selection for adaptation that colonizing populations have undergone. It also enables us to maximize the success of searches for effective biological control agents. We determined the number of successful colonization events...

Plant‐soil feedback (PSF) theory provides a powerful framework for understanding plant dynamics by integrating growth assays into predictions of whether soil communities stabilise plant–plant interactions. However, we lack a comprehensive view of the likelihood of feedback‐driven coexistence, partly because of a failure to analyse pairwise PSF, the metric directly linked to plant species coexistence. Here, we determine the rel...

Knowledge of aquaculture–environment interactions is essential for the development of a sustainable aquaculture industry and efficient marine spatial planning. The effects of fish and shellfish farming on sessile wild populations, particularly infauna, have been studied intensively. Mobile fauna, including crustaceans, fish, birds and marine mammals, also interact with aquaculture operations, but the interactions are more comp...

Animals can be important in modulating ecosystem‐level nutrient cycling, although their importance varies greatly among species and ecosystems. Nutrient cycling rates of individual animals represent valuable data for testing the predictions of important frameworks such as the Metabolic Theory of Ecology ( MTE ) and ecological stoichiometry ( ES ). They also represent an important set of functional traits that may reflect both...

Baker's Law predicts uniparental reproduction will facilitate colonization success in novel habitats. While evidence supports this prediction among colonizing plants and animals, few studies have investigated shifts in reproductive mode in haplo‐diplontic species in which both prolonged haploid and diploid stages separate meiosis and fertilization in time and space. Due to this separation, asexual reproduction can yield the do...

A synthesis of results from two projects was assessed to analyse possible influence of sea lice Lepeophtheirus salmonis on marine Atlantic salmon Salmo salar survival. During the years 1992–2004, trawling for wild migrating post‐smolts was performed in Trondheimsfjord, a fjord in which no Atlantic salmon aquaculture activity is permitted. Prevalence and intensity of sea lice infections on migrating wild post‐smolts differed be...

The arctic fox ( Alopex lagopus ) in Scandinavia is classified as critically endangered after having gone through a severe decline in population size in the beginning of the 20th century, from which it has failed to recover despite more than 65 years of protection. Arctic foxes have a high dispersal rate and often disperse over long distances, suggesting that there was probably little population differentiation within Scandina...

While DNA‐based markers can provide a wealth of information for the study of plant evolutionary biology, progress is limited by the lack of primers available for PCR. To overcome this limitation, we outline a protocol for developing oligonucleotide primers targeting regions of low copy‐number nuclear genes. This protocol is intended to lead to universally useful primer sets. To test our approach, we designed eight primer sets...