Condo or cuisine? The function of fine woody debris in driving decomposition, detritivores, and their predators.

Community structure and ecosystem function may be driven by the size or the energy within a given habitat, but these metrics (space and energy) are difficult to separate, especially in systems where the habitat itself is also food, such as detritus. Only a handful of studies have attempted to isolate potential mechanisms experimentally, which has left a notable knowledge gap in understanding the drivers of community structure and function. Here, we tested whether fine woody debris (FWD) affects leaf litter communities primarily as a source of space or energy.

Navigating uncertainty in maximum body size in marine metazoans.

Body size is a fundamental biological trait shaping ecological interactions, evolutionary processes, and our understanding of the structure and dynamics of marine communities on a global scale. Accurately defining a species' body size, despite the ease of measurement, poses significant challenges due to varied methodologies, tool usage, and subjectivity among researchers, resulting in multiple, often discrepant size estimates. These discrepancies, stemming from diverse measurement approaches and inherent variability, could substantially impact the reliability and precision of ecological and evolutionary studies reliant on body size data across extensive species datasets.

Sunken trees in the deep sea link terrestrial and marine biodiversity.

Wood in the deep sea serves as a substantial food source in an otherwise barren environment, forming specialized, endemic, and diverse community assemblages. This biodiversity reliance on a terrestrial source creates a linkage by which anthropogenic impacts on land can alter the deep oceans. Knowledge of the alpha- or beta-diversity of entire wood-fall communities, and wooden drivers of each would elucidate the terrestrial and deep-sea linkage.

Functional space expansion driven by transitions between energetically advantageous traits in the deep sea.

Climate change is shifting community structure and biodiversity on a global scale, in part due to alterations of chemical and thermal energy availability. These changes may impact ecosystem functioning through their influence on functional diversity. We investigate patterns of functional diversity, functional niches, and functional traits in bivalve communities across the energetic gradient of the deep Atlantic Ocean.

Energetic constraints on body-size niches in a resource-limited marine environment.

Body size of life on the Earth spans many orders of magnitude, and with it scales the energetic requirements of organisms. Thus, changes in environmental energy should impact community body-size distributions in predictable ways by reshaping ecological and niche dynamics. We examine how carbon, oxygen and temperature, three energetic drivers, impact community size-based assembly in deep-sea bivalves.

Extremophiles in Earth's Deep Seas: A View Toward Life in Exo-Oceans.

Humanity's search for extraterrestrial life is a modern manifestation of the exploratory and curious nature that has led us through millennia of scientific discoveries. With the ongoing exploration of extraterrestrial bodies, the potential for discovery of extraterrestrial life has expanded. We may better inform this search through an understanding of how life persists and flourishes on Earth in a myriad of environmental extremes.

Anthropogenic disruptions to longstanding patterns of trophic-size structure in vertebrates.

Diet and body mass are inextricably linked in vertebrates: while herbivores and carnivores have converged on much larger sizes, invertivores and omnivores are, on average, much smaller, leading to a roughly U-shaped relationship between body size and trophic guild. Although this U-shaped trophic-size structure is well documented in extant terrestrial mammals, whether this pattern manifests across diverse vertebrate clades and biomes is unknown. Moreover, emergence of the U-shape over geological time and future persistence are unknown.

Visible name changes promote inequity for transgender researchers.

Allowing for invisible name changes is a matter of dignity for trans researchers. This would prevent their own publication record from outing them without their consent. A single, centralized name change request through ORCID iD would alleviate the burden of changing each publication individually.

Alligators in the abyss: The first experimental reptilian food fall in the deep ocean.

The high respiration rates of the deep-sea benthos cannot be sustained by known carbon supply pathways alone. Here, we investigate moderately-sized reptilian food falls as a potential alternative carbon pathway. Specifically, three individual carcasses of Alligator mississippiensis were deployed along the continental slope of the northern Gulf of Mexico at depths of ~2000m in early 2019.

Persistent and substantial impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea megafauna.

The Deepwater Horizon spill is one of the largest environmental disasters with extensive impacts on the economic and ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico. Surface oil and coastal impacts received considerable attention, but the far larger oil spill in the deep ocean and its effects received considerably less examination. Based on 2017 ROV surveys within 500 m of the wellhead, we provide evidence of continued impacts on diversity, abundance and health of deep-sea megafauna.

Likes, comments, and shares of marine organism imagery on Facebook.

Several calls to action urge scientists and science communicators to engage more with online communities. While these calls have been answered by a high percentage of scientists and science communicators online, it often remains unclear what are the best models for effective communication. Best practices and methods for online science communication can benefit from experimental and quantitative research addressing how and when users engage with online content.

Energetic increases lead to niche packing in deep-sea wood falls.

Mechanisms leading to variation in diversity over energetic gradients continue to challenge ecologists. Changes in diversity may reflect the environmental capacity to support species' coexistence through increased niche packing or niche space expansion. Current ecological theory predicts that increases in energy may lead to both scenarios but not their relative strengths.

Energetic tradeoffs control the size distribution of aquatic mammals.

Four extant lineages of mammals have invaded and diversified in the water: Sirenia, Cetacea, Pinnipedia, and Lutrinae. Most of these aquatic clades are larger bodied, on average, than their closest land-dwelling relatives, but the extent to which potential ecological, biomechanical, and physiological controls contributed to this pattern remains untested quantitatively. Here, we use previously published data on the body masses of 3,859 living and 2,999 fossil mammal species to examine the evolutionary trajectories of body size in aquatic mammals through both comparative phylogenetic analysis and examination of the fossil record.

Increased energy differentially increases richness and abundance of optimal body sizes in deep-sea wood falls.

Theoretical and empirical studies suggest that the total energy available in natural communities influences body size as well as patterns of abundance and diversity. But the precise mechanisms underlying these relationships or how these three ecological properties relate remain elusive. We identify five hypotheses relating energy availability, body size distributions, abundance, and species richness within communities, and we use experimental deep-sea wood fall communities to test their predicted effects both on descriptors describing the species-richness-body-size distribution, and on trends in species richness within size classes over an energy gradient (size-class-richness relationships).

The Evolution of Energetic Scaling across the Vertebrate Tree of Life.

Metabolism is the link between ecology and physiology-it dictates the flow of energy through individuals and across trophic levels. Much of the predictive power of metabolic theories of ecology derives from the scaling relationship between organismal size and metabolic rate. There is growing evidence that this scaling relationship is not universal, but we have little knowledge of how it has evolved over macroevolutionary time.

Practices and promises of Facebook for science outreach: Becoming a "Nerd of Trust".

Arguably, the dissemination of science communication has recently entered a new age in which science must compete for public attention with fake news, alternate facts, and pseudoscience. This clash is particularly evident on social media. Facebook has taken a prime role in disseminating fake news, alternate facts, and pseudoscience, but is often ignored in the context of science outreach, especially among individual scientists.

Multiple processes generate productivity-diversity relationships in experimental wood-fall communities.

Energy availability has long been recognized as a predictor of community structure, and changes in both terrestrial and marine productivity under climate change necessitate a deeper understanding of this relationship. The productivity-diversity relationship (PDR) is well explored in both empirical and theoretical work in ecology, but numerous questions remain. Here, we test four different theories for PDRs (More-Individuals Hypothesis, Resource-Ratio Theory, More Specialization Theory, and the Connectivity-Diversity Hypothesis) with experimental deep-sea wood falls.

Marine extinction risk shaped by trait-environment interactions over 500 million years.

Perhaps the most pressing issue in predicting biotic responses to present and future global change is understanding how environmental factors shape the relationship between ecological traits and extinction risk. The fossil record provides millions of years of insight into how extinction selectivity (i.e.

Extinctions. Paleontological baselines for evaluating extinction risk in the modern oceans.

Marine taxa are threatened by anthropogenic impacts, but knowledge of their extinction vulnerabilities is limited. The fossil record provides rich information on past extinctions that can help predict biotic responses. We show that over 23 million years, taxonomic membership and geographic range size consistently explain a large proportion of extinction risk variation in six major taxonomic groups.

Does energy availability predict gastropod reproductive strategies?

The diversity of reproductive strategies in nature is shaped by a plethora of factors including energy availability. For example, both low temperatures and limited food availability could increase larval exposure to predation by slowing development, selecting against pelagic and/or feeding larvae. The frequency of hermaphroditism could increase under low food availability as population density (and hence mate availability) decreases.

Metabolic dominance of bivalves predates brachiopod diversity decline by more than 150 million years.

Brachiopods and bivalves feed in similar ways and have occupied the same environments through geological time, but brachiopods were far more diverse and abundant in the Palaeozoic whereas bivalves dominate the post-Palaeozoic, suggesting a transition in ecological dominance 250 Ma. However, diversity and abundance data alone may not adequately describe key changes in ecosystem function, such as metabolic activity. Here, we use newly compiled body size data for 6066 genera of bivalves and brachiopods to calculate metabolic rates and revisit this question from the perspective of energy use, finding that bivalves already accounted for a larger share of metabolic activity in Palaeozoic oceans.

Unravelling the determinants of insular body size shifts.

The island rule, a pattern of size shifts on islands, is an oft-cited but little understood phenomenon of evolutionary biology. Here, we explore the evolutionary mechanisms behind the rule in 184 mammal species, testing climatic, ecological and phylogenetic hypotheses in a robust quantitative framework. Our findings confirm the importance of species' ecological traits in determining both the strength and the direction of body size changes on islands.

Energetics of life on the deep seafloor.

With frigid temperatures and virtually no in situ productivity, the deep oceans, Earth's largest ecosystem, are especially energy-deprived systems. Our knowledge of the effects of this energy limitation on all levels of biological organization is very incomplete. Here, we use the Metabolic Theory of Ecology to examine the relative roles of carbon flux and temperature in influencing metabolic rate, growth rate, lifespan, body size, abundance, biomass, and biodiversity for life on the deep seafloor.

Extinctions in ancient and modern seas.

In the coming century, life in the ocean will be confronted with a suite of environmental conditions that have no analog in human history. Thus, there is an urgent need to determine which marine species will adapt and which will go extinct. Here, we review the growing literature on marine extinctions and extinction risk in the fossil, historical, and modern records to compare the patterns, drivers, and biological correlates of marine extinctions at different times in the past.