Articles

Livebearers in the family Poeciliidae are some of the most widely introduced fishes. Native poeciliid translocations within the U.S. are mostly due to deliberate stocking for mosquito control. Introductions of exotic poeciliids, those not native to the U.S., are more likely to be due to release from aquaria or escape from farms. Many of these non-natives originate from warm climate...

Nannizziopsis guarroi is an ascomycete fungus associated with a necrotizing dermatitis in captive green iguanas (Iguana iguana) and bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) across both Europe and North America. Clinical signs of the disease include swelling and lesion formation. Lesions develop from white raised bumps on the skin and progress into crusty, yellow, discolored scales, eventually...

Costs to producing sexual signals can create selective pressures on males to invest signaling effort in particular contexts. When the benefits of signaling vary consistently across time, males can optimize signal investment to specific temporal contexts using biological rhythms. Sea lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, have a semelparous life history, are primarily nocturnal, and rely on...

Translocated animals undergo a phase of behavioral adjustment after being released in a novel environment, initially prioritizing exploration and gradually shifting toward resource exploitation. This transition has been termed post-release behavioral modification. Post-release behavioral modification may also manifest as changes in habitat selection through time, and these temporal...

Lead (Pb) exposure is a widespread wildlife conservation threat. Although commonly associated with Pb-based ammunition from big-game hunting, small mammals (e.g., ground squirrels) shot for recreational or pest-management purposes represent a potentially important Pb vector in agricultural regions. We measured the responses of avian scavengers to pest-shooting events and examined their...

Vernal pools of the northeastern United States provide important breeding habitat for amphibians but may be sensitive to droughts and climate change. These seasonal wetlands typically fill by early spring and dry by mid-to-late summer. Because climate change may produce earlier and stronger growing-season evapotranspiration combined with increasing droughts and shifts in precipitation...

ABSTRACT: The deep ocean hosts a large diversity of azooxanthellate cold-water corals whose associated microbiomes remain to be described. While the bacterial genus Endozoicomonas has been widely identified as a dominant associate of tropical and temperate corals, it has rarely been detected in deep-sea corals. Determining microbial baselines for these cold-water corals is a critical...

A robust method for characterizing the biophysical environment of terrestrial vegetation uses the relationship between Actual Evapotranspiration (AET) and Climatic Water Deficit (CWD). These variables are usually estimated from a water balance model rather than measured directly and are often more representative of ecologically-significant changes than temperature or precipitation. We...

Chemical contamination of freshwaters is a global problem. In the United States alone, millions of kilometers of rivers and hectares of lakes and wetlands are impaired from contamination by chemicals including mercury, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and trace metals (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2017). Efforts to mitigate the risks of contamination have largely...

Tilting of the ground due to loading by the variable atmosphere is known to corrupt very long period horizontal seismic records (below 10 mHz) even at the quietest stations. At BFO (Black Forest Observatory, SW-Germany), the opportunity arose to study these disturbances on a variety of simultaneously operated state-of-the-art broad-band sensors. A series of time windows with clear...

Misunderstandings regarding the term “false positive” present a significant hurdle to broad adoption of eDNA monitoring methods. Here, we identify three challenges to clear communication of false-positive error between scientists, managers, and the public. The first arises from a failure to distinguish between false-positive eDNA detection at the sample level and false-positive inference...

Model ensembles have several benefits compared to single-model applications but are not frequently used within the lake modelling community. Setting up and running multiple lake models can be challenging and time consuming, despite the many similarities between the existing models (forcing data, hypsograph, etc.). Here we present an R package, LakeEnsemblR, that facilitates running...