Particulate waste from open‐cage fish farms in marine systems can cause organic enrichment of seabed habitats and enter the food web through consumption by wild organisms, with potential for broader ecosystem changes. Effects on biogeochemistry and benthic ecology are reasonably well understood in inshore, sheltered and soft sediment systems. However, food web effects and interactions with epifauna and larger consumers is less...

Aim Topographic complexity is widely accepted as a key driver of biodiversity, but at the patch‐scale, complexity–biodiversity relationships may vary spatially and temporally according to the environmental stressors complexity mitigates, and the species richness and identity of potential colonists. Using a manipulative experiment, we assessed spatial variation in patch‐scale effects of complexity on intertidal biodiversity. Lo...

Fear of predation produces large effects on prey population dynamics through indirect risk effects that can cause even greater impacts than direct predation mortality. As yet, there is no general theoretical framework for predicting when and how these population risk effects will arise in specific prey populations, meaning that there is often little consideration given to the key role predator risk effects can play in understa...

In theory, survival rates and consequent population status might be predictable from instantaneous behavioural measures of how animals prioritize foraging vs. avoiding predation. We show, for the 30 most common small bird species ringed in the UK, that one quarter respond to higher predation risk as if it is mass‐dependent and lose mass. Half respond to predation risk as if it only interrupts their foraging and gain mass thus...