Standard methods for marking caudate amphibians do not impair animal welfare over the short term: An experimental approach.

Major advancements in ecology and biodiversity conservation have been made thanks to methods for marking and individually tracking animals. Marking animals is both widely used and controversial due to the potential consequences for animal welfare, which are often incompletely evaluated prior to implementation. Two outstanding knowledge gaps concerning the welfare consequences of individual marking are their short-term behavioural impacts and the relative impacts from marking versus the handling of animals while carrying out procedures.

Trait variation in patchy landscapes: Morphology of spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) varies more within ponds than between ponds.

The influence of intraspecific trait variation on species interactions makes trait-based approaches critical to understanding eco-evolutionary processes. Because species occupy habitats that are patchily distributed in space, species interactions are influenced not just by the degree of intraspecific trait variation but also the relative proportion of trait variation that occurs within- versus between-patches. Advancement in trait-based ecology hinges on understanding how trait variation is distributed within and between habitat patches across the landscape.

Host Identity Matters-Up to a Point: The Community Context of Transmission.

AbstractThe level of detail on host communities needed to understand multihost parasite invasions is an unresolved issue in disease ecology. Coarse community metrics that ignore functional differences between hosts, such as host species richness, can be good predictors of invasion outcomes. Yet if host species vary in the extent to which they maintain and transmit infections, then explicitly accounting for those differences may be important.

Broadening the ecology of fear: non-lethal effects arise from diverse responses to predation and parasitism.

Research on the 'ecology of fear' posits that defensive prey responses to avoid predation can cause non-lethal effects across ecological scales. Parasites also elicit defensive responses in hosts with associated non-lethal effects, which raises the longstanding, yet unresolved question of how non-lethal effects of parasites compare with those of predators. We developed a framework for systematically answering this question for all types of predator-prey and host-parasite systems.

Microbial Grazers May Aid in Controlling Infections Caused by the Aquatic Zoosporic Fungus .

Free-living eukaryotic microbes may reduce animal diseases. We evaluated the dynamics by which micrograzers (primarily protozoa) apply top-down control on the chytrid () a devastating, panzootic pathogen of amphibians. Although micrograzers consumed zoospores (∼3 μm), the dispersal stage of chytrids, not all species grew monoxenically on zoospores.