Elephant seals as ecosystem sentinels for the northeast Pacific Ocean twilight zone.

The open ocean twilight zone holds most of the global fish biomass but is poorly understood owing to difficulties of measuring subsurface ecosystem processes at scale. We demonstrate that a wide-ranging carnivore-the northern elephant seal-can serve as an ecosystem sentinel for the twilight zone. We link ocean basin-scale foraging success with oceanographic indices to estimate twilight zone fish abundance five decades into the past, and into the future.

Extensive genome evolution distinguishes maize within a stable tribe of grasses.

Over the last 20 million years, the Andropogoneae tribe of grasses has evolved to dominate 17% of global land area. Domestication of these grasses in the last 10,000 years has yielded our most productive crops, including maize, sugarcane, and sorghum. The majority of Andropogoneae species, including maize, show a history of polyploidy - a condition that, while offering the evolutionary advantage of multiple gene copies, poses challenges to basic cellular processes, gene expression, and epigenetic regulation.

Long-term studies should provide structure for inclusive education and professional development.

Long-term studies are critical for ecological understanding, but they are underutilized as inclusive opportunities for training ecologists. We use our perspective from the Año Nuevo elephant seal programme along with surveys from community members to propose that long-term studies could be better leveraged to promote inclusive education and professional development in ecology. Drawing on our experiences as mentors and mentees, we demonstrate how long-term studies can use their resources, including rich data, robust logistics and extensive professional networks, to improve recruitment and retention of diverse groups of trainees.

Systematic Review of Sex-specific High Sensitivity Cardiac Troponin I and T Thresholds.

Purpose: High-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) and T (hs-cTnT) have been demonstrated to have lower sex-specific 99th percentiles in healthy females. However, these sex-specific thresholds are not widely adopted in clinical practice which could lead to underdiagnosis of acute myocardial infarction in females. We conducted a systematic review to explore sex-specific 99th percentiles for hs-cTnI and hs-cTnT from healthy reference populations.

Maximizing biological insights from instruments attached to animals.

Instruments attached to animals ('biologgers') have facilitated extensive discoveries about the patterns, causes, and consequences of animal behavior. Here, we present examples of how biologging can deepen our fundamental understanding of ecosystems and our applied understanding of global change impacts by enabling tests of ecological theory. Applying the iterative process of science to biologging has enabled a diverse set of insights, including social and experiential learning in long-distance migrants, state-dependent risk aversion in foraging predators, and resource abundance driving movement across taxa.