Populations of fishes provide valuable services for billions of people, but face diverse and interacting threats that jeopardize their sustainability. Human population growth and intensifying resource use for food, water, energy and goods are compromising fish populations through a variety of mechanisms, including overfishing, habitat degradation and declines in water quality. The important challenges raised by these issues ha...

Summary The anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) is mediated by consortia of anaerobic methane‐oxidizing archaea (ANME) and their specific partner bacteria. In thermophilic AOM consortia enriched from Guaymas Basin, members of the ANME‐1 clade are associated with bacteria of the HotSeep‐1 cluster, which likely perform direct electron exchange via nanowires. The partner bacterium was enriched with hydrogen as sole electron dono...

Heterothermy plays an important role in lowering the costs of thermoregulation in endotherms by reducing water and energy requirements. We tested predictions that birds in arid habitats should express fine‐scale variation in their thermoregulatory patterns as a function of prevailing climatic conditions. We assessed effects of air temperature ( T air ) and water vapor pressure deficit ( D ) on body temperature ( T b ) in free‐...

Regime shifts are sudden changes in ecosystem structure that can be detected across several ecosystem components. The concept that regime shifts are common in marine ecosystems has gained popularity in recent years. Many studies have searched for the step‐like changes in ecosystem state expected under a simple interpretation of this idea. However, other kinds of change, such as pervasive trends, have often been ignored. We ass...

A regime shift is a large, sudden, and long‐lasting change in the dynamics of an ecosystem, affecting multiple trophic levels. There are a growing number of papers that report regime shifts in marine ecosystems. However, the evidence for regime shifts is equivocal, because the methods used to detect them are not yet well developed. We have collated over 300 biological time series from seven marine regions around the UK, coveri...

Integrative studies of genetics, neurobiology and behaviour indicate that polymorphism in specific genes contributes to variation observed in some complex social behaviours. The neuropeptide arginine vasopressin plays an important role in the regulation of a variety of social behaviours, including social attachment of males to females, through its action on the vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). In socially monogamous prairie vol...

Terrestrial ecosystems sequester 2.1 Pg of atmospheric carbon annually. A large amount of the terrestrial sink is realized by forests. However, considerable uncertainties remain regarding the fate of this carbon over both short and long timescales. Relevant data to address these uncertainties are being collected at many sites around the world, but syntheses of these data are still sparse. To facilitate future synthesis activit...

Canterbury mudfish ( Neochanna burrowsius ) are endemic to a small region of Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand and classified as nationally endangered. We reviewed data from the New Zealand Freshwater Fish Database and trapped fish in July 2006, and January and February 2007 in the Waianiwaniwa Valley, Canterbury to determine the importance of this catchment for mudfish conservation. Mudfish were found in 19 of the 28 site...