Aim Landmasses have been continuously modified by tectonic activity, the breakup and collision of landmasses is thought to have generated or suppressed ecological opportunities, altering the rates of speciation, dispersal and extinction. However, the extent to which the signatures of past geological events are retained in modern biodiversity patterns—or obliterated by recent ecological dynamics—remains unresolved. We aim to id...

Coastal benthic biodiversity is under increased pressure from climate change, eutrophication, hypoxia, and changes in salinity due to increase in river runoff. The Baltic Sea is a large brackish system characterized by steep environmental gradients that experiences all of the mentioned stressors. As such it provides an ideal model system for studying the impact of on‐going and future climate change on biodiversity and function...

Growth of farmed, wild and F1 hybrid Atlantic salmon parr Salmo salar was investigated under three contrasting feeding regimes in order to understand how varying levels of food availability affects relative growth. Treatments consisted of standard hatchery feeding ( ad libitum ), access to feed for 4 h every day, and access to feed for 24 h on three alternate days weekly. Mortality was low in all treatments, and food availabil...

Differences in resource use or in tolerances to abiotic conditions are often invoked as potential mechanisms underlying the sympatric distribution of cryptic species. Additionally, the microbiome can provide physiological adaptations of the host to environmental conditions. We determined the intra‐ and interspecific variability of the microbiomes of three cryptic nematode species of the Litoditis marina species complex that co...

Biodiversity assessment is the key to understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but there is a well‐acknowledged biodiversity identification gap related to eukaryotic meiofaunal organisms. Meiofaunal identification is confounded by the small size of taxa, morphological convergence and intraspecific variation. However, the most important restricting factor in meiofaunal ecological research i...

In order to assess the utility of nested clade analysis, both standard phylogenetic algorithms and nested clade analysis were performed on a geographically widespread survey of mitochondrial DNA haplotypes of the bamboo viper, Trimeresurus stejnegeri , within Taiwan. Gross tree topologies were congruent for all analyses and indicated the presence of two geographically overlapping clades within Taiwan. The smaller lineage was r...