Rationale Fatal opioid overdoses involving synthetic opioids have increased >10-fold over the past 8 years. Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid acting at the mu-opioid receptor (MOR), has largely replaced heroin as the predominant illicit opioid available. Various analogs have been synthesized from the fentanyl scaffold, including 2-furanylfentanyl, one of the most trafficked analogs from 2019 to 2024. Despite its prevalence,...

Cephalopod biology, which is characaterised by short lifespans, semelparous reproduction, rapid non-asymptotic growth, and seasonally fluctuating biomass, presents a particular challenge stock assessment. Small scale, data-poor artisanal octopus fisheries are an increasingly important source of food and income for coastal fishing communities but pose a particularly pernicious assessment challenge. We developed and tested a nov...

The polar sea-ice zones are highly productive and seasonal habitats that support large populations of vertebrate predators. In the Antarctic, snow petrels ( Pagodroma nivea ) are regarded as highly ice-dependant, yet knowledge of their habitat use and foraging distribution during the breeding period comes largely from ship-based observations. Snow petrels show sexual size dimorphism, and previous studies have demonstrated a de...

Developing spatially explicit assessment and management techniques that engage stakeholder behaviour has been an enduring priority for fisheries targeting benthic marine invertebrates like abalone. This study describes the basis of ‘Shellogy’; a concept with the potential to empower reef‐scaled management by using shell morphology to qualitatively evaluate abalone populations and their variability. The premise of shellogy is t...

Predators regulate communities through top‐down control in many ecosystems. Because most studies of top‐down control last less than a year and focus on only a subset of the community, they may miss predator effects that manifest at longer timescales or across whole food webs. In southeastern US salt marshes, short‐term and small‐scale experiments indicate that nektonic predators (e.g., blue crab, fish, terrapins) facilitate th...

Patterns of cohort decline are key demographic traits that provide a unique temporal perspective vital to understanding population dynamics. The discovery of multidecadal lifespans in tropical surgeonfishes in the 1990s created a paradigm shift to the notion that they are highly vulnerable species with low population recovery rates; however, research into the mortality patterns of surgeonfishes (Acanthuridae) has been sparse u...

As the world population grows, fisheries practitioners will be under increased pressure to address global challenges in data-limited fisheries management. With a focus on addressing localized and case-specific management needs, we provide a practical guide to the design and development of multi-indicator frameworks for fishery management. In a data-limited context, indicators are observations or estimates of the state of the f...

Under certain conditions, dispersed crude oil in the sea combines with organisms, organic matter, and minerals to form marine oil snow (MOS), thereby contributing to the sinking of oil to the seafloor. Marine microbes are the main players in MOS formation, particularly via the production of extracellular polymeric substances. Distinct groups of microbes also consume the majority of the hydrocarbons during descent, leading to e...

Socioecological theories predict that, in mammals, feeding and mating competitions affect male and female energetic conditions differently but energetic studies investigating both sexes simultaneously are rare. We investigated the effect of socioecological factors on the energetic conditions of male and female western chimpanzees, a long-lived species with high degrees of male-male competition. We used behavioural data collect...

Foundation species enhance biodiversity and multifunctionality across many systems; however, whether foundation species patch configuration mediates their ecological effects is unknown. In a 6‐month field experiment, we test which attributes of foundation species patch configuration – i.e. patch size, total patch area, perimeter, area‐perimeter ratio, or connectivity – control biodiversity, stability and multifunctionality by...