Marine mammals rely on blubber mainly for energy storage, buoyancy, and streamlining. Mysticetes are born with a relatively thin fat layer that grows rapidly during nursing. However, little information on blubber deposition patterns is available for baleen whale calves. We measured blubber thickness at nine body locations in 350 southern right whale ( Eubalaena australis ) newborn to 4–6‐month‐old calves that died on the Penín...

The campo rupestre is a unique mountaintop ecosystem in eastern South America, recognised for its endemism and as ecological refugia for plant and animal taxa. Multiple clades of frogs are represented in the Brazilian campo rupestre. One such case is four species of the Leptodactylus fuscus group, three of which are endemic to specific mountain ranges ( Leptodactylus camaquara , Leptodactylus oreomantis and Leptodactylus tapit...

Collaborative monitoring over broad scales and levels of ecological organization can inform conservation efforts necessary to address the contemporary biodiversity crisis. An important challenge to collaborative monitoring is motivating local engagement with enough buy-in from stakeholders while providing adequate top-down direction for scientific rigor, quality control, and coordination. Collaborative monitoring must reconcil...

Coral loss is a major element of global ecological change in the oceans that may shape the behavior of keystone species such as habitat-attached animals. Farming damselfishes cultivate and aggressively protect algal garden within their territory, thereby shaping local fish assemblages and macro-algae diversity. Following the widespread loss of live branching coral throughout Florida and the Caribbean Sea, dusky damselfish ( St...

Península Valdés ( PV ) in Argentina is an important calving ground for southern right whales ( SRW s, Eubalaena australis ). Since 2005, right whale mortality has increased at PV , with most of the deaths (~90%) being calves HAB s) in these deaths by examining data that include: timing of the SRW deaths, biotoxins in samples from dead SRW s, abundances of the diatom, Pseudo‐nitzschia spp., and the dinoflagellate, Alexandrium...

Aim Disentangling the effects of climate and historical factors on biodiversity distribution remains a challenge for biogeographers. Here, we provide an analytical framework to discriminate the contributions of contemporary climate and the biogeographical history of taxa to the geographical distributions of phylogenetic lineages. Furthermore, we evaluate the constraint that the biogeographical history of clades exerts on the a...

Right whales carry large populations of three ‘whale lice’ ( Cyamus ovalis , Cyamus gracilis , Cyamus erraticus ) that have no other hosts. We used sequence variation in the mitochondrial COI gene to ask (i) whether cyamid population structures might reveal associations among right whale individuals and subpopulations, (ii) whether the divergences of the three nominally conspecific cyamid species on North Atlantic, North Pacif...