Antarctic cushion star Odontaster validus larval performance is negatively impacted by long-term parental acclimation to elevated temperature.

Cross-generational responses, when the parents' environment influences offspring performance, may contribute to species resilience to climate change in rapidly warming regions such as coastal Antarctica. Adult Antarctic sea stars Odontaster validus were conditioned in the laboratory to two temperature treatments (ambient, 0 °C and warming, +3 °C) for two years, and their gametes were used to generate larval offspring. The response of their larvae to five temperatures (0 °C, 1 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C, and 4 °C) was examined over 145 days.

Synchronised monitoring of plant and insect diversity: a case study using automated Malaise traps and DNA-based methods.

The occurrence and distribution of insects and their possible associations with plant species are largely unknown in Germany and baseline data to monitor future trends are urgently needed. Using newly-designed automated Malaise trap multi-samplers, the occurrence of insect species and their potential associations with plants was monitored synchronously at two contrasting field sites in Germany: an urban botanical garden and a forest research station. Taxa were identified by metabarcoding of the insects and the plant traces present in the preservative ethanol of the Malaise trap samples.

Lurking in the water: testing eDNA metabarcoding as a tool for ecosystem-wide parasite detection.

In the light of global biodiversity change and emerging disease, there is an urgent need to establish efficient monitoring programmes of parasites in aquatic ecosystems. However, parasite identification is time-consuming, requires a high degree of taxonomic expertize and in general requires lethal sampling. The use of environmental DNA methodology to identify parasites has the potential to circumvent these limitations.

The people science: can passively crowdsourced internet data shed light on host-parasite interactions?

Every internet search query made out of curiosity by anyone who observed something in nature, as well as every photo uploaded to the internet, constitutes a data point of potential use to scientists. Researchers have now begun to exploit the vast online data accumulated through passive crowdsourcing for studies in ecology and epidemiology. Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of iParasitology, i.

Green Plants in the Red: A Baseline Global Assessment for the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants.

Plants provide fundamental support systems for life on Earth and are the basis for all terrestrial ecosystems; a decline in plant diversity will be detrimental to all other groups of organisms including humans. Decline in plant diversity has been hard to quantify, due to the huge numbers of known and yet to be discovered species and the lack of an adequate baseline assessment of extinction risk against which to track changes. The biodiversity of many remote parts of the world remains poorly known, and the rate of new assessments of extinction risk for individual plant species approximates the rate at which new plant species are described.

The complete mitochondrial genome of the deep-sea stony coral Solenosmilia variabilis (Scleractinia, Caryophylliidae) and its inter-individual variation.

Three individual-specific DNA libraries of the deep-sea scleractinian coral Solenosmilia variabilis (Duncan, 1873) were constructed to obtain complete mitochondrial genomes using the 454 Life Science pyrosequencing system. Two mitogenomes were successfully assembled: both were 15,968 bp in length, with base composition of A (24.2%), T (41.

The complete mitochondrial genome of the deep-sea sponge Poecillastra laminaris (Astrophorida, Vulcanellidae).

The complete mitochondrial genome of a New Zealand specimen of the deep-sea sponge Poecillastra laminaris (Sollas, 1886) (Astrophorida, Vulcanellidae), from the Colville Ridge, New Zealand, was sequenced using the 454 Life Science pyrosequencing system. To identify homologous mitochondrial sequences, the 454 reads were mapped to the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of Geodia neptuni (GeneBank No. NC_006990).