Exploring spatio-temporal changes in coastal recreational fisheries and potential links to extreme weather events.

Extreme weather events across coastal environments are expected to increase in frequency under predicted climate change scenarios. These events can impact coastal recreational fisheries and their supporting ecosystems by influencing the productivity of fish stocks or altering behaviours and decision-making among fishers. Using off-site telephone/diary survey data on estuarine and oceanic recreational fishing activity in eastern Australia, we analyse interannual and geographic variability in bream (Acanthopagrus spp) and snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) catch, total effort and total catch per unit effort (CPUE) through a period (2013/2014, 2017/2018 and 2019/2020) that encompassed severe drought, bushfires and flooding.

Fish attraction to artificial reefs not always harmful: a simulation study.

The debate on whether artificial reefs produce new fish or simply attract existing fish biomass continues due to the difficulty in distinguishing these processes, and there remains considerable doubt as to whether artificial reefs are a harmful form of habitat modification. The harm typically associated with attraction is that fish will be easier to harvest due to the existing biomass aggregating at a newly deployed reef. This outcome of fish attraction has not progressed past an anecdotal form, however, and is always perceived as a harmful process.

How to build a mammalian super-predator.

Questions surrounding the biology of large fossil predators that differ markedly from living forms have long intrigued palaeobiologists. Among such taxa few have excited more interest than sabertooth cats, whose distinctive hypertrophied canines are suggestive of killing behaviors and feeding ecologies that may have departed widely from those of extant carnivores. Moreover, considerable variation among sabertooth species is further suggestive of intriguing differences within the group.