Taylor's power law for freshwater fishes: Functional traits beyond statistical inevitability.

Taylor's power law (TPL) describes the expected range of parameters of the mean-variance scaling relationship and has been extensively used in studies examining temporal variations in abundance. Few studies though have focused on biological and ecological covariates of TPL, while its statistical inherences have been extensively debated. In the present study, we focused on species-specific features (i.

The sensitivity of complex dynamic food webs to the loss of top omnivores.

Theoretical studies have attempted to predict the effects of losing species and their relative importance to community-level processes, but little attention has been paid to specific interaction types such as omnivory and the trophic level of extinct species. Here, we use complex food web models to assess the importance of omnivores to community-level stability. We simulated food webs with varying size and complexity so we could remove omnivores from different trophic levels and track the fates of communities.

Storage or Run-of-river Reservoirs: Exploring the Ecological Effects of Dam Operation on Stability and Species Interactions of Fish Assemblages.

Water level variation has an important role in the biology of fish species, driving behavior, feeding, and reproduction both in natural and modified environments. In reservoirs, different dam operation schemes result in alternative patterns of water level fluctuations. Storage (STR) reservoirs accumulate water and can vary the water level unpredictably, whereas this variation is more discrete in run-of-river (ROR) reservoirs.

Connectance and nestedness as stabilizing factors in response to pulse disturbances in adaptive antagonistic networks.

Understanding how network architectures are related to community robustness is essential to investigating the effects of disturbances on biological systems. Regarding the perturbations that are observed in disturbance regimes, frequency and intensity are two main descriptors, specifically for those events with short duration. Here, I used the architecture of 45 real-world weighted bipartite networks to assess whether network size, connectance, and nestedness are related to the effects of pulse disturbances in antagonistic communities.

Population structure and reproductive biology of Astyanax gymnodontus (Characiformes: Characidae), a poorly known endemic fish of the Iguaçu River basin, Brazil.

Success in fish breeding depends on reproduction intensity, periodicity and the place where it occurs. Information about fish species reproduction is important to assist managers, and to determine conservation and management strategies. The fish assemblage of the Iguaçu River basin is already known for its high endemism, and despite this privilege, the large number of dams built along it, threat this particular biodiversity.